{"id":42667,"date":"2024-03-28T15:12:29","date_gmt":"2024-03-28T19:12:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=42667"},"modified":"2024-03-29T13:59:43","modified_gmt":"2024-03-29T17:59:43","slug":"siri-regressions-in-ios-17","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2024\/03\/28\/siri-regressions-in-ios-17\/","title":{"rendered":"Siri Regressions in iOS 17"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>For many years, I&rsquo;ve been saying &ldquo;Hey Siri, remember to <em>x<\/em>&rdquo; to create reminders on my iPhone (to be transferred to OmniFocus). Sometimes it would have trouble with the &ldquo;<em>x,<\/em>&rdquo; but it would always create a reminder. Now, this only works some of the time: sometimes it creates a reminder, but sometimes it creates a <em>note<\/em>. I have not seen any other documentation of this change, and what&rsquo;s especially strange is that the behavior is not consistent. I can say the exact same thing twice in a row and end up with one reminder and one note. I tried to look up how Apple intends it to work and found only <a href=\"https:\/\/support.apple.com\/en-us\/HT205890\">this<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/support.apple.com\/en-us\/HT205890\"><p>You can ask Siri&nbsp;to schedule a reminder for you on your iOS device or your&nbsp;Apple Watch. Here are a few examples:<\/p><ul><li>&ldquo;Remind me to feed the dog every day at 7:30 a.m.&rdquo;<\/li><li>&ldquo;Remind me when I get home to check the mail.&rdquo;<\/li><li>&ldquo;Remind me when I leave here to stop by the grocery store.&rdquo;<\/li><li>&ldquo;Remind me tomorrow at 3:00 p.m. to call Tara.&rdquo;<\/li><\/ul><\/blockquote>\n<p>Indeed, &ldquo;remind me&rdquo; seems to always create a reminder. I&rsquo;m trying to switch, but it&rsquo;s taking a while for me to get used to saying that. But what happened to &ldquo;remember to&rdquo;? I don&rsquo;t see any documentation from Apple about that. The <a href=\"https:\/\/support.apple.com\/en-us\/HT205773\">notes documentation<\/a> only mentions &ldquo;Start a new note&rdquo;. There are lots of <a href=\"https:\/\/colterreed.com\/remember-everything-with-siri\/\">third-party<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/support.omnigroup.com\/collecting-with-siri-in-omnifocus-2\/\">sites<\/a> confirming my memory that &ldquo;Remember to&rdquo; used to create reminders.<\/p>\n<p>I don&rsquo;t like &ldquo;Remind me&rdquo; because, for many short reminders, &ldquo;Remind me <em>x<\/em>&rdquo; or &ldquo;Remind me to <em>x<\/em>&rdquo; sounds ungrammatical.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;Remember&rdquo; is also problematic in that sometimes if I tell it to remember a podcast (meaning that I want a reminder to listen to that podcast) it will tell me that it has <em>subscribed<\/em> me to the podcast&mdash;only it did not actually do so in either Overcast <em>or<\/em> in Apple Podcasts.<\/p>\n<p>Even with &ldquo;Remind me,&rdquo; Siri has the same old problems:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Sometimes it tries to interpret what I say, changing a time or day of the week in my utterance into a <em>due date<\/em>, so that the remaining text no longer makes sense.<\/li>\n<li>It also thinks certain phrases or word combinations are lists and splits them into separate reminders, removing the connecting words, which again loses the meaning of what I was trying to remember.<\/li>\n<li>Sometimes it will show on screen exactly what I said but not actually do anything.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/social.ayjay.org\/2023\/11\/15\/a-significant-change.html\">Alan Jacobs<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/social.ayjay.org\/2023\/11\/15\/a-significant-change.html\">\n<p>A significant change in Siri dictation over the past few months: commas. Commas that I don&rsquo;t ask for. Lots and lots of commas. This has made dictation effectively unusable for me, and I wonder whether it&rsquo;s time for me to start looking for a different phone.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/meowkoteeq\/status\/1772936512948093110\">meowkoteeq<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/meowkoteeq\/status\/1772936512948093110\">\n<p>for years i used to say &ldquo;balcony&rdquo; or &ldquo;dining table light&rdquo; to Siri, and it would just toggle the lights.<\/p>\n<p>a few weeks ago it forgot how to do that. now it always confirms &ldquo;do i turn it on or off?&rdquo;. it&rsquo;s literally getting more and more stupid<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/jbella\/status\/1770458039986131054\">Joseph Bella<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/jbella\/status\/1770458039986131054\">\n<p>It is astounding how bad it is. Even things that used to work fine like asking Siri to send a text message now don&rsquo;t seem to work consistently anymore. Sometimes she asks me if I want to use the phone number or email, and other times it just tries to call the person. Sigh.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n<p>Previously:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2024\/03\/28\/giving-up-on-siri-and-homepod\/\">Giving Up on Siri and HomePod<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2021\/09\/30\/the-disappointment-of-on-device-siri\/\">The Disappointment of On-Device Siri<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n<p id=\"siri-regressions-in-ios-17-update-2024-03-29\">Update (2024-03-29): <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/heyyoudvd\/status\/1751201525991424379\">Dave B.<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/heyyoudvd\/status\/1751201525991424379\"><p>I encountered a weird bug with Siri the other day that I couldn&rsquo;t help but wonder if it was the result of LLM testing.<\/p><p>[&#8230;]<\/p><p>How would it get 555 Easy Street? That&rsquo;s conflating the data from two separate fields in the contact. That is not a normal Siri screw-up, as all the info is coded into the contact and I&rsquo;ve never had an issue.<\/p><p>With this, it almost felt like Siri&rsquo;s mapping directions tried to use an LLM to read the contact and comprehend the destination (and mess up in the process), rather than simply pulling the data from the relevant field.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/DamienPetrilli\/status\/1773431014066442716\">Damien Petrilli<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/DamienPetrilli\/status\/1773431014066442716\">\n<p>Siri is one of the obvious case of Apple monopoly abuse. No way they would have been able to keep it in that state for so long if you could change the assistant system wise.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For many years, I&rsquo;ve been saying &ldquo;Hey Siri, remember to x&rdquo; to create reminders on my iPhone (to be transferred to OmniFocus). Sometimes it would have trouble with the &ldquo;x,&rdquo; but it would always create a reminder. Now, this only works some of the time: sometimes it creates a reminder, but sometimes it creates a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2024-03-28T19:12:33Z","apple_news_api_id":"f188079c-6258-4699-ad5e-f03521b9f09f","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2024-03-29T17:59:46Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAw==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/A8YgHnGJYRpmtXvA1Ibnwnw","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":[31,2321,700,526,690,247],"class_list":["post-42667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-ios","tag-ios-17","tag-notes","tag-omnifocus","tag-reminders","tag-siri"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42667","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=42667"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42667\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42688,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42667\/revisions\/42688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}