A peace offering from Siri
Every year, there’s an announcement about new features and improvements in Siri. They generally consist of:
- Here are some fancy new features that make a great demo, but I’m more interested in existing stuff working correctly.
- Here are some major improvements that sound similar to what you already announced last year or the year before. Well, they still don’t work.
So I suggest a peace offering from Siri for her (or his, or their) users.
- Allow every user to submit one Siri feature they’d like to see work reliably. Very targeted things like playing a song, setting a timer, or telling me the weather.
- Collect all the requests and rank the Top 10 suggestions
- Fix at least one of them so that it’s better than 95% reliable
- Disband all future work on Siri
Then we can just accept the current state of Siri and not have our dreams crushed yearly. If you never have problems with Siri, I suspect you are not using it with HomePod.
Siri on Apple Watch is interesting. Most of the time when I want to set a timer I just say something like “14 minutes” and all is good. But once in a while I’ll say the exact same phrase and the reply is (to paraphrase ) “The app Timer is not installed” or “I don’t understand” — even though it correctly heard me say “14 minutes”. Huh?
Same here. I feel like timers might still be going through the server even though I feel like every year there’s a promise to move more things locally. My other favorite is that I often shift between using the word “timer” and “alarm” and it doesn’t like that. Saying “set an alarm for 2 hours” should figure out what I mean. 🙂
My “biggest Siri bug” would be that, when you ask Siri on Apple Watch to set a timer, the timer starts counting down from when Siri finishes processing your voice, not when you started speaking. So, if you ask for a two-minute timer and Siri needs 20 seconds to get its act together, the timer goes off two minutes and 20 seconds after you asked for it.
It seems like it wouldn’t be hard to start the countdown from the time that Siri detected the utterance…
That was one of the very first Siri bugs I ever filed. 🙂