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Comment by scrumper | Hacker News Reader

The whole thing is buggered. My latest, in car, on 26.6.2 with phone connected via bluetooth. I hold the voice button on my steering wheel down to activate Siri:

"Call Fred."

"You'll need to unlock your phone for that."

"Call Fred."

"You'll need to unlock your phone for that."

"Call Fred."

"OK, calling Fred."

Phone is locked in my pocket the entire time. Like, make your damn mind up. Every time I try to call from the car now I have to ask it at least twice, usually three times.

And a completely baffling one recently, not even anonymizing names, also in car:

"Call George."

"OK adding L.S.D. by Hallucinogen to your Liked Songs playlist."

WTAF.

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“Good night.”

Literal 10 seconds later.

“Setting the scene good night.”

Another 2-3 seconds later, the lights go off.

I don’t understand what it’s trying to do, simple tasks should be instant, what am I waiting for? The entire Siri became unusable and simply trash.

Edit: For reference, it used to turn off the lights as I complete my sentence and put my wrist down.

Yes! it's so darn slow, then there's a 50/50 chance it either does the thing, or does nothing at all. It's driving me a bit bonkers.

I mean, they moved it from a deterministic set of actions to an AI-pilled LLM nightmare with probably a paucity of all test cases covered given the near-infinite permutations and actions available.

A smarter release would have been extremely limited in scope, heavily tested, and aimed simply for feature parity. Or even scoping it to just one section, like editing/adding/updating calendar events and all associated functionality. Or even exploring routing to much-less hallucinatory, more performant models like CNN for certain tasks instead of just throwing everything at probabilistic model and hoping for the best.

But that's not the way of AI-pilled middle manager thinking now.

One more for you.

While I’m away from my phone: “hey dingus play podcasts”

“I’m sorry you don’t have Apple Music subscription”

Apple should stop pushing for subscriptions. Especially when nothing is working anymore.

HomeKit is so painfully slow and flaky.

I've switched to Home Assistant and the same devices on the same network work instantly, as they should.

Apple is so terrible at this. They have nobody to blame: it's their system, their protocol (I have pre-Matter devices), their home hub, their certified devices.

Home Assistant with a pile of community-maintained python hacks runs circles around Apple.

Just convinced me to not to buy the new Home device for a wall screen

> For reference, it used to turn off the lights as I complete my sentence and put my wrist down.

What probably happened is that it used to be one of the preset instructions it pattern-matched your request to, but now they inserted an LLM in between all of that, so you have to wait for it to return some tokens and then eventually call the internal method for triggering the scene.

I mostly like it, but it randomly changes what commands it accepts.

Last week:

Me: Hey Siri, turn off the bedroom lights. Siri: I’m sorry, I can’t change a scene. Me: Hey Siri, turn the bedroom lights off. Siri: OK!

This week:

Me: Hey Siri, turn the bedroom lights off. Siri: I’m sorry, I can only do one thing at a time. Me: Hey Siri, turn off the bedroom lights. Siri: OK!

Next week:

Me: Hey Siri —— Siri: The red zone has always been for loading and unloading of passengers. There's never stopping in a white zone.

Like, please just pick one and stick that in the integration tests. I promise I’ll learn the syntax if you choose an official one. Any official one.

That's also what drives me absolutely insane - I want a guide from Apple that gives me a regular syntax I can use to get predictable results with Siri. The fuzzy, natural language stuff in Siri is so bad that it's completely unpredictable what will work.

Super frustrating. It's the best thing about LLMs, that you can be so imprecise and human with your discussion, with context maintained from input to input. Siri doesn't have the predictability of an old-school fixed syntax voice agent (like Wildfire from the '90s - remember that? It worked!) and doesn't have the flexibility of a proper natural language interaction with an LLM. It lacks any sort of working memory - "Create an appointment on Tuesday at 3pm." "OK." "Name it 'Mechanic visit'" "Now playing songs by Mike and the Mechanics."

Yeah, the lack of memory is a huge problem - makes it impossible to conversationally correct a mistake. Instead, you have to start the interaction from the top and hope that this time it works out.

I wonder if it’s using the microphone in your pocket instead of the cars mic.

Huh interesting idea and quite easy to test by putting the phone in a blanket in the trunk. It's definitely using the car speakers, and when I do eventually get a call through I am heard clearly, but perhaps that initial interaction is using the phone mic.

A lot of car microphones also suck

But that wouldn't explain why it wants you to unlock it

If it’s misunderstanding the command and thinking it needs an unlock twice, but then finally gets it correctly and does it without an unlock.. that actually could be explained by the microphone

From my experience an iPhone SE 3 in the pocket can hear pretty well

Good thing Siri and Alexa are going through a phase, otherwise Siri would’ve added that LSD to your Amazon shopping list!

At least then it would be trying to make me happy.

I've seen bugs like this which have led me to wonder if apple has a problem with generating UUIDs which aren't really unique.

It's the only way I can explain some of the totally bizarre Siri (and other iOS and macOS) bugs.

You can still trick your phone to switch to classic Siri (or even the smart Siri before the current AI iOS 27 Siri). Maybe it will work better ?

Yeah I get the same thing when trying to open the garage door. Have never been able to figure out what the rule is.

Wait, so you're telling me security can be overcome by simply repeating the request 3 times?

Uh, can anyone do that? Can pickpockets and government stooges do the same thing to get into my phone?

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