Ask HN: It's 2024, why are voice assistants still so buggy? Still feels like 20% of the time I try to use Siri/Alexa, they hit one of these failure modes: 1. Fail to activate 2. Fail to respond (just keep listening forever) 3. Activate on the wrong device (talking to Siri on Phone, HomePod 2 rooms over responds) 4. Fail to access data they should have ("Who is speaking?" or "I'm having trouble...") Thinking over it, I think voice assistants have the most bugs of any technology I use daily. |
I know a few people who lightly use them for timers or music, but almost no one goes deeper than that.
It's just the idea that the gear is spying on me, and I don't know where the data go for processing, that is the big downer.
I wonder if Apple will roll out a paid Siri Pro tier (with LLM). Maybe that would incentivize investment into tablestake features (ie. responding reliably).
Siri is more of a value add for people buying Apple hardware, like everything else in iOS and macOS. It can also be seen as an accessibility feature. It was never really meant to be its own revenue stream. It’s funded by hardware sales.
Some things are out my control, like if Alexa picks up the skill invocation phrase or parses the response correctly.
I suspect LLMs will help with this. Alexa is already integrating LLMs with their newer skill kits.
I guess that's evidence that Apple really isn't competing on quality of most of their products. Once you're locked in their ecosystem, you just take what you get.