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Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

It feels like unnecessarily complicated way to give instructions to you phone or computer. It's not that I can't see it being useful in some cases, but more often than not, it gets in the way, if it's not something you use regularly. I just want to be able to turn off Siri permanently. Just remove all possibilities of me triggering Siri. Why Siri is included on the Mac at all is something I don't understand.

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It complements the UI by summarizing properly: “Will it rain tonight?” and “Set an alarm for 6am” are the only two usecases I’ve been satisfied with, but they work much better than the UI.

I’m not sure it’s worth the development time. But it’s like: Let’s create a UI with all info we think the user wants, and everything else will be done by Siri.

But we asked Siri if it was going to rain, it said unequivocally no, we didn’t take umbrellas or raincoats and it rained. We got soaked :(

This isn't inherent to voice assistants though (which is what this subthread is about). Siri is a known, particularly poor implementation of a voice assistant. I don't have an Alexa, but I just moved to a city where rainy days come out of nowhere. My Google Home is concise and precise about the chance that I'll need an umbrella, including what time the chance of rain starts.

I don’t know if it’s related but the weather app on iOS frequently takes minutes to update the weather for my location even when looking directly at the app. It’s incredibly annoying and has led me to believe the weather was going to be completely different more than once.

> just want to be able to turn off Siri permanently.

It's your lucky day! There is an "Enable Ask Siri" checkbox in System Preferences on macOS, and a similar toggle in the iOS Settings app.

Yes, you think that would do it, but no. Now instead of triggering Siri, you now trigger "Do you want to enable Siri?". I never want to press something that might trigger anything Siri related.

I want a check box that says: "Ask to enable Siri", which I can uncheck. So "Enable Ask Siri" should be off, and "Ask to enable Siri" also off.

I see, actually I do remember macOS used to occasionally nag me to enable Siri (in response to accidentally pressing something, I think). But I don’t think it’s done that since upgrading to Big Sur.

I want the same, but for Android. It is possible to uninstall it, but it always come back with the next upgrade.

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