Apple buys machine learning specialist Inductiv to bolster Siri, AI projects

Not to repeat myself here but let's hope this finally improves Siri... Though I unfortunately doubt it. 

Latest Siri idiocy: "Hey Siri, remind me in 15 minutes to do x" "Ok, I've set a reminder for yesterday at nn:nn." Wtf? How in the hell have they managed to introduce a bug like that? Even more odd is that the reminder actually goes off at the correct time on other devices.

Another one I've discovered is you can't add "thyme" to a shopping list. Siri just flat out doesn't understand that "thyme" doesn't always refer to "time" , no matter how you phrase it. So I've taken to saying "Add the herb thyme to my shopping list", which results in "the herb Thyme" listed instead... Not great. At all.

elijahg said:

Not to repeat myself here but let's hope this finally improves Siri... Though I unfortunately doubt it. 

Latest Siri idiocy: "Hey Siri, remind me in 15 minutes to do x" "Ok, I've set a reminder for yesterday at nn:nn." Wtf? How in the hell have they managed to introduce a bug like that? Even more odd is that the reminder actually goes off at the correct time on other devices.

Another one I've discovered is you can't add "thyme" to a shopping list. Siri just flat out doesn't understand that "thyme" doesn't always refer to "time" , no matter how you phrase it. So I've taken to saying "Add the herb thyme to my shopping list", which results in "the herb Thyme" listed instead... Not great. At all.

Interesting. 

Even though I find the phrasing “remind me in 15 minutes to do x” a bit odd, I gave it a bash and it worked fine. I usually say “remind me to do x in 15 minutes”, but Siri is happy with either. 

I run into the second one occasionally. You can hit edit and one of the options will be “add thyme to the shopping list”, so it obviously knows what thyme is. What I find is that Siri will then add both entries to the list 🙄. 

The easiest thing to do is spell out the word:

“Add t-h-y-m-e to shopping list”

I’ve had high hopes for Siri to develop and be more intuitive but it really hasn’t happened yet. At some some point we will see if these acquisitions pan out to improvements. I guess this is a limitation of a privacy focused approach to an assistant. I’ve never used Google’s assistant so I really can’t compare but Alexa can’t hear as good as Siri on my HomePods. 

Rayz2016 said:

elijahg said:

Not to repeat myself here but let's hope this finally improves Siri... Though I unfortunately doubt it. 

Latest Siri idiocy: "Hey Siri, remind me in 15 minutes to do x" "Ok, I've set a reminder for yesterday at nn:nn." Wtf? How in the hell have they managed to introduce a bug like that? Even more odd is that the reminder actually goes off at the correct time on other devices.

Another one I've discovered is you can't add "thyme" to a shopping list. Siri just flat out doesn't understand that "thyme" doesn't always refer to "time" , no matter how you phrase it. So I've taken to saying "Add the herb thyme to my shopping list", which results in "the herb Thyme" listed instead... Not great. At all.

Interesting. 

Even though I find the phrasing “remind me in 15 minutes to do x” a bit odd, I gave it a bash and it worked fine. I usually say “remind me to do x in 15 minutes”, but Siri is happy with either. 

I run into the second one occasionally. You can hit edit and one of the options will be “add thyme to the shopping list”, so it obviously knows what thyme is. What I find is that Siri will then add both entries to the list ߙ䮦amp;nbsp;

The easiest thing to do is spell out the word:

“Add t-h-y-m-e to shopping list”

My somewhat clumsy way of asking is because I have learnt over time how to speak to Siri to produce the least errors... If I say "remind me to do x in 1 hour" and Siri doesn't quite hear properly, or sometimes even if it does, I end up with a reminder that literally says "do x in 1 hour" which then goes off 15 minutes later. There's (still) zero comprehension written into Siri, it literally sees "minutes" or "time" and assumes any number near that must be the variable to use as time, which is why it gets confused when it hears "thyme" and there is no number nearby. There are similar lack of comprehension issues around timers too, if you ask it to add n minutes to your for example 20 minute timer, it just sees a number in your command and sets that timer to n minutes. Which was really annoying the first time it happened.

The transcription is usually impressively good, it rarely gets a word wrong, and that has had a notable improvement since they started using AI. But for some reason they don't seem to use AI in the comprehension, I guess that's a lot more difficult to do with Apple's computer generated AI training method than Google/Amazon's with actual customer data; though Apple does use actual customer data to some extent.

I didn't know you could spell things out though so thanks for that!  :smile: 

Siri needs to be drowned in a bathtub.