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Comment by fnord123 | Hacker News Reader

>The problem is that otherwise "Hey Siri" wouldn't work on (newer) Macs.

I've never heard anyone use Siri on their Mac. I'm surprised they still bother supporting it.

Me neither, but I also wonder how many non-expert users actually know that it is available. There is the initial dialog about Siri when setting up a Mac. After that, it is not that prominent. Moreover, it's a bit embarrassing to use in an office environment anyway.

That reminds me: I knew some people who had been using Macs for years who did not really know that Spotlight existed, let alone that you could use Command + space to start a Spotlight search. They would launch applications through the Finder and put regularly-used applications in the Dock.

I use it all the time. It's a great additional channel for commands in some workflows.

Can you give some examples? The only way I can think it's helpful is for hands free use, but that's more a scenario for a phone or tablet rather than a laptop.

Adding reminders is the only thing I ever use it for. They carry across to the iPhone, of course, so if I need to remind myself to do something later in the day it's quite helpful.

I'd use it to set timers, too (by far the most frequent thing I use Siri for on iPhone) but annoyingly that doesn't work from the Mac.

I got new AirPods and loved it for about an hour. "Hey Siri, open Spotify." "Hey Siri, next track" and so on while I was walking around. I'm spending most of my day on conf calls, so the AirPods are in anyway.

Then they started false triggering about every ten minutes. "Hey Siri, decrease sensitivity" does nothing. "Hey Siri, set a timer": "nope your $4k computer can't count time."

Turned it off. Sorry.

I use it to control my lights and heating when I'm in the same room as my computer (which is also my TV room).

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