“The HomePod is coming Friday, and with it, even more attention is being paid to Siri, Apple’s voice assistant that serves as its primary interface,” Jason Snell writes for Macworld. “The early HomePod reviews are in, and most of them suggest the device is an excellent speaker that’s hampered by Siri’s limitations.”
“I haven’t used a HomePod yet, so I can’t speak to that, but as someone with a constellation of Apple devices, it does seem to me that Siri could stand to use some improvement,” Snell writes. “When I asked a bunch of dedicated Apple users what they’d like to see changed in Siri, I (unsurprisingly) stepped into a long list of grievances.”
“As has been exposed in initial reviews of the HomePod, Siri doesn’t support multiple named timers, which is a problem — especially if you’re cooking. The single most used feature of our Amazon Echo is timers, believe it or not,” Snell writes. “It’s incredibly useful to be able to call out with your voice as you’re moving pots around on the stove and chopping vegetables, and Siri would benefit from this feature across all its platforms.”
MacDailyNews Take: We just say “Hey Siri, set a timer for [number] minutes,” and our Apple Watches – which are always right there on our wrists – do the rest. No Echo – or HomePod – required. Of course, the ability to do multiple timers on a single device would be useful. Right now, we just set another timer on our iPhones or iPads. But, of course, Apple is too cash-poor and short-staffed to spend the three hours it would take to add multiple timer capability.
“Siri’s palette can be dramatically expanded by opening up to web services, not just apps resident on an iOS device,” Snell writes. “In true Apple fashion, such a move wouldn’t come via a wide-open skills market like Amazon’s. Instead, I assume Siri web integrations would need to be approved by Apple before being placed in the Siri equivalent of the App Store.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple released Siri, the first modern digital virtual assistant, in October 2011. Amazon released Alexa in November 2014. Google Assistant was released in May 2016.
So, why are we even talking about this? Why is Siri not regarded as far and away the best, but rather as notably worse than those later entrants?
Mismanagement of the project from the software to the marketing.