Friday, July 3, 2015

Using Siri

My experience with Siri keeps changing. I’m pleased with the recent change where you no longer have to confirm before a reminder is added. Instead, you just tap Remove if Siri got it wrong. There’s still no good way to edit if Siri got it partially right, though. And sometimes Siri is repeatedly so far off that it’s not even enough to jog my memory; I wish I had just stopped to type.

It is maddening how many times I will see that the phone has cell service and dictate my reminder, only to have Siri spin seemingly forever or complain that it doesn’t have an Internet connection. Couldn’t it have told me that sooner? Or recorded what I’d said so that it could be replayed when a connection becomes available? Since Siri requires a connection, it shouldn’t even play the “start talking” prompt unless it knows that it can reach the server.

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On Windows Dragon NaturallySpeaking (and its derivatives) will optionally to play back your corresponding speech when you try to correct something, so if it's completely wrong later you can fix it. It uses quite a bit of disk space to store all your recorded speech, but for the size of a typical Siri dictation it would make sense.

The lack of retry or handling of poor quality connections is just infuriating, I agree.

Agree with the lack of retry. Infuriating.

As long as your Siri request doesn't leave the "Siri screen", you can scroll up and tap the transcribed text to edit it.

@Michael Sometimes that works, but sometimes it doesn’t show me “Tap to Edit.”

I have the same reactions as you.

80-90% of the time, skipping confirmation is a huge timesaver, but for reasons that I cannot discern, Siri occasionally-but-regularly mis-guesses the AM/PM if I dictate the reminder without explicitly specifying AM/PM/night/morning/etc. (which I do almost all the time). Before, I could just get her attention and say "Change the time" and fix it, but that doesn't work now.

The is-there-really-an-internet-connection-or-not thing I see less often, but it does seem ridiculous that Siri lets you dictate and then comes back later to say there's no internet.

It also feels like dictation/recognition accuracy has gotten worse for me over the past several months; I have to do a lot more correcting of things that come back way out in left field than I used to.

@Smokey Yes, my accuracy was great back in January. It seems to have dropped since then.

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