Siri waveform on Apple Watch Series 4 now responds dynamically to the sound of your voice

“The waveform in the Siri interface on Apple Watch Series 4 works differently to how Siri behaves on other devices,” Benjamin Mayo reports for 9to5Mac. “It now animates the waveform in sync with changes in volume, like how Siri on iPhone works. Previous watches were much cruder.”

“If you look at how Siri animation works on Apple Watch Series 3 or earlier, the waves of rainbow colours dance freely and continuously as soon as the Siri modal view is presented,” Mayo reports. “The animation is completely canned and is not synchronized to the user input (speaking with your voice) in any way.”

“Siri on iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and macOS do it ‘properly,'” Mayo reports. “The waveform does reflect the actual speech input; the waves bounce around a lot when speaking, and die away when the user takes a breath. Apple Watch Series 4 running watchOS 5 brings this same behavior to the wrist.”

“The dictation animation, which looks like a series of grey lines that change in height, does not gain this newfound dynamic animation ability,” Mayo opines. “It’s pretty stupid that Apple did not deploy the same improvements seen on the Siri waveform to the dictation screen, hopefully that can follow in a future software update.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Now, when you ask Siri something, you’ll have a nice accurate waveform animation before she delivers her usual inaccurate results. Excellent!

Seriously, Siri does get some things right, just not nearly enough things for a product that’s been around for 8+ years and that had a huge head start, but has since been overtaken by more nimble, hungrier, harder-working, better-managed competitors. Siri does do the best job of safeguarding users’ privacy (and, no, not just because most of us have learned not to bother trying to use Siri for anything important).

As for the waveform, perhaps the Apple S3 and under, each of which in all honesty often seemed to be overtaxed already, weren’t capable enough to handle the computation whereas the new S4 in Apple Watches Series 4 can?

As for not also having the responsive Siri waveform on the dictation screen: Tim Cook’s Apple isn’t exactly renowned for their attention to detail or for having everything (or, too often, anything) ready to go at launch.

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