The baffling part of Apple’s AI strategy - they continue to insist on using the “Siri” brand. That brand is damaged beyond repair and has been for many years, maybe since it was first launched 10+ years ago. The recent mistakes of over promising and under delivering have further eroded the brand to near zero. For a company that comes up with ridiculous branding of small features (Retina Display, Force Touch, Dynamic Island) the choice to keep “Siri” and its negative connotations is un-Apple like.
Agree, Siri is a damaged brand. Microsoft had the insight to drop Cortana when it flopped too.
In the age of LLMs I also increasingly view my experience with "Hey Google" and "Alexa... " with similar contempt. Their output feels so bad compared to what ChatGPT's voice gets me. All of the big tech companies seem to be struggling immensely to deploy the latest in AI advancements.
I never tried advanced things with "Hey Google" but it always gets the basics right for me:
"go home" opens maps app with a route to my home.
"alarm in", "alarm at", "what time is it?" works well too.
In fact I'm afraid they'll break it by shoving down Gemini.
Alexa is the same with basics, works well for me with "reminder in X hours", "reminder at 10am on every workday", "alarm at", "play The Strokes", "add coffee to the list" (groceries)
Alexa is really bad with any advanced stuff I've tried. Didn't try with "hey Google"
I agree Alexa/Hey Google are generally great at following commands.. but lately I find myself most wanting to use voice primarily for getting quick answers to factual or opinion based questions. There the results are abysmal vs ChatGPT voice.
It also doesn't help that ChatGPT's voice cadence is much closer to sounding like a real human.
Siri meanwhile is still far behind both Alexa and Google Assistant in its basic voice-to-text conversion capabilities -- a pain point I experience everytime I talk into my Apple TV remote to search for content.
And here we're on an English speaking forum, I can tell you that no matter how bad you think Siri is, it's actually 2x worse in the other languages they support.
