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Comment by hedgehog | Hacker News Reader

Me, driving, using Apple Maps for navigation: "Hey Siri, what's my ETA?"

Siri: ... "Here's what I found on the web for "what is my ETA'"

From outside I don't know the cause but contrary to their normal reputation for better integration between parts of their products it seems like Siri is in some organizational way fundamentally broken.

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When I was a respiratory therapist I was working a code in an ER for a motorcyclist crash, we were doing CPR and pushing meds and the MD uses Vocera, the digital hospital voice assistance dohicky we all wore on our collars to "call the X-Ray tech" and the stupid thing bleeps back in it's robot voice, "CALLING: PIZZA TRUCK."

It was one of the most surreal moments of my career. It was an emergency and the team was dialed in to saving this guy and the entire moment was just super "wtf!!" We all looked at each other and nobody really did anything. We all already hated Vocera with the fire of 10,000 suns and that dumbass moment just was the ultimate example of how dumb it was. The MD just moved on and barked at the ER tech to go get x-ray and to this day I am surprised he didn't rip the vocera off his collar and throw it across the room or put it on the ground and stomp on it.

Vocera was always a buggy piece of crap that was the miserable bane of our existence. After the code (the guy didn't make it) on of the nurses was smoking outside on the benches and was like "I didn't even know we had a pizza truck."

Hey , just want to say thanks for doing such a hard job. I know I couldn't do that kind of work day in and day out. So thank you for doing the real hard work and making it all a better place for all of us.

Thank you! RT was actually way easier than nursing... RTs only deal with fluids from above the waistline.

Was the hate for Vocera shared among all who had to use it? How did it come to pass that you had to use Vocera?

Yes everyone hated it, but hospital admins forced us to use it. Giant hospital system with a enormous service provider contracts so user happiness and feedback isn't really a factor. The threads of people complaining about Vocera on reddit are pretty entertaining: https://www.reddit.com/r/nursing/comments/1lfavny/the_day_fi...

The most awesome voice system I ever used was the Motorola push to talk walkie talkies we used when I was a medic. Those things were bombproof and never lost signal, never f*cked up, just always worked, batteries last for weeks and were reliable af. Those things were the freaking BEST lol.

Google assistant isn't much better. In fact it got worse once they replaced it with gemini. I used to be able to say "hey Google turn lights off" and it'd connect to my Google home and turn lights off. Now it's usually "I can't do that" or "searching for turn lights off." once it even helpfully started playing Ellie Goulding's "Lights" at double speed.

Thanks technology.

Mine can't "silence alarm" anymore, because it apologetically informs me that there aren't any alarms currently ringing.

That's not even a command-interpretation issue, it's simply broken functionality between 100% stock Google software.

I can't get mine to start a stopwatch anymore.

It’s weird how it gets worse. To this day, I think the barely remembered iPhone voice assistant with incantations was better than Siri at any point.

Oh good, so when Apple goes live with its Gemini-Siri mashup, I won't have to adjust to anything since neither of them works.

It's so bad. This happens to me on a weekly basis:

"Get directions to <restaurant in the city I live>"

"Getting directions to <restaurant with same name 800 miles away>"

Every. Time. No, I'm not interested in something with a similar name on the other side of the planet, I'm interested in the thing that is a 10-20min. drive away from me.

Me: “navigate home”

Google: “navigating to Home Depot”

True story. Bug was closed as not reproducible.

I never understood why they haven't had a team implementing simple features like that for over a decade. It's not even AI. Have a dashboard of the most commonly tried things every day, and develop the features.

Am i stupid, or did the thing actually used to work 10+ years ago??

I think the ETA thing did work at one point.

Yes, before they went "machine learning" all these assistants were much closer to command lines you spoke to - you had to learn the phrases, but they'd work reliably once you did.

Now they basically never work.

I'd love something like this to run at home. Like an open weight model with a configurable command grammar that returns the most likely thing I said that matches the grammar. I've found things that are close but they have bits missing (like support for English) or aren't really open.

It's still AI. Natural language processing has long been a branch of AI well before LLMs came out.

“Hey Siri, change my alarm to 9am”

“I found 4 alarms: one at 6:30am, a sleep alarm, currently on. Another alarm at 8:15am, currently off. A third at 8:45am, currently off. A fourth at 9am, currently off”

—

“Siri, play the album Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, by David Bowie, on Apple Music.”

“Now playing Stardust by Nat King Cole”

Honestly this shit is borderline useless. On the plus side I enunciate much more clearly in the car.

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