Siri Improvements
I’ve noticed over the past year that Siri is getting faster — both at parsing spoken input and returning results. I use iOS’s voice-to-text dictation feature on a near-daily basis, and it’s especially noticeable there.
Mostly what I have noticed is that Siri is a lot more reliable than it used to be. I had stopped using it because for years it would essentially throw away what I’d said. It was either unavailable (most of the time) or it didn’t understand me properly (less often). Now I regularly use it to make reminders while driving, and it pretty much always works.
Update (2015-01-17): Garrett Murray:
Watching Siri translate word-for-word as you speak give you the confidence to keep speaking and also makes it clear the moment she loses you. It completely changes the feature from “interesting tech demo” to “I’ll use this on a daily basis”.
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[…] Michael Tsai chimes in with agreement, emphasizing improvements in reliability: […]
That's interesting; I've noticed the exact opposite.
When I try to use dictation, Siri frequently hangs with no response. The common thing I use Siri for is calling phone numbers. Rather than dialing a number, I'll dictate the phone number to Siri. In the last few months, Siri has started dropping digits or even spelling out certain numbers instead of using digits. It's not even a case where Siri is misunderstanding- I'll see it display numbers as I dictate, and it will actually _drop_ numbers as I go along.
Siri for a long time has been mostly good enough, if slow, but recently I've stopped trusting it for even simple tasks.
I'm Scottish, and despite being relatively accent free, neither Siri or Google Now work for me. I think it's a mix of cadence & idiom that throws them off, trying to speak "Californian" occasionally bags a correct response.
Oddly, Cortana worked out of the gate.
I've had great success since Siri was introduced, specifically with SiriTexting while I drive. I switched to Apple's earbuds from a bluetooth earpiece just before Siri was released and perhaps that has helped in the positive experience for me. I routinely have two or three SiriText conversations at once while driving. What I have noticed is that SiriText doesn't mark a message as read (remove the alert) after she reads it to me anymore.
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