{"id":33787,"date":"2021-09-30T16:45:52","date_gmt":"2021-09-30T20:45:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=33787"},"modified":"2021-09-30T16:47:00","modified_gmt":"2021-09-30T20:47:00","slug":"the-disappointment-of-on-device-siri","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2021\/09\/30\/the-disappointment-of-on-device-siri\/","title":{"rendered":"The Disappointment of On-Device Siri"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.macstories.net\/stories\/ios-and-ipados-15-the-macstories-review\/20\/#siri\">Federico Viticci<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/www.macstories.net\/stories\/ios-and-ipados-15-the-macstories-review\/20\/#siri\"><p>The most important addition to Apple&rsquo;s assistant this year is that, starting with iOS and iPadOS 15, Siri will work offline by default. As announced by Apple at WWDC, the Neural Engine can now process your requests locally, on-device, with the same quality of server-based speech recognition.<\/p>\n<p>In practice, since the switch to offline processing, I haven&rsquo;t noticed a degradation of quality in terms of how Siri interprets my requests, but it hasn&rsquo;t gotten smarter than before either. I suppose this is good for Apple since, at the very least, moving away from server-based processing hasn&rsquo;t made Siri worse.<\/p>\n<p>Obviously, only some types of requests will work offline.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n<p>I don&rsquo;t understand why creating reminders can&rsquo;t work offline. I can see Siri transcribe everything I&rsquo;ve said, but then it just stops and says that my phone needs to be online. I&rsquo;m not asking it to do anything fancy like use a particular list or set a date.<\/p>\n\n<p>I was also hoping that offline support would make the voice control features faster by eliminating server latency. That hasn&rsquo;t happened, either. It can still take 10&#x2013;15 seconds to pause music or a podcast, during which Siri gives me spoken feedback that it&rsquo;s still working on my request. And, again, I can see on the screen that it correctly <em>transcribed<\/em> what I said right away. Why does it take so long to actually <em>process<\/em> it? It was faster and more consistent on-device before Siri, in the iPhone 4 days.<\/p>\n\n<p>Timers work offline and are quicker than voice control, but they still feel slower than Alexa talking to the server. And there&rsquo;s still only one.<\/p>\n\n<p>Previously:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2021\/06\/15\/ios-15-on-device-siri\/\">iOS 15: On-device Siri<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2018\/09\/17\/homepod-now-supports-multiple-timers\/\">HomePod Now Supports Multiple Timers<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2018\/02\/16\/multiple-ios-timers\/\">Multiple iOS Timers<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Federico Viticci: The most important addition to Apple&rsquo;s assistant this year is that, starting with iOS and iPadOS 15, Siri will work offline by default. As announced by Apple at WWDC, the Neural Engine can now process your requests locally, on-device, with the same quality of server-based speech recognition. In practice, since the switch to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2021-09-30T20:45:56Z","apple_news_api_id":"2cef175f-e8ee-44f7-b7c7-b5f72bf42ad8","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2021-09-30T20:47:03Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/ALO8XX-juRPe3x7X3K_Qq2A","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1631,31,2078,690,247],"class_list":["post-33787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-clock-app","tag-ios","tag-ios-15","tag-reminders","tag-siri"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33787"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33787\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33791,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33787\/revisions\/33791"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}