How is siri doing

Music Siri can find the song you want to hear. Just ask. Learn more about Apple Music. Siri recognizes individual voices for a more personalized music experience on HomePod.

Siri suggests the playlists you want. Right when you want them. Home Siri is a smart way to run your smart home. Learn more about the Home app. Siri suggests scenes based on your routine. Tap to turn the lights off and the heat down.

Knowledge on the Go Siri has answers to all kinds of questions. Stay on top of stocks, scores, your schedule, your Activity rings, and more with the Siri watch face. Neural text-to-speech technology helps Siri sound natural, especially for longer phrases. Siri gets you answers even before you finish searching in Safari. More Powerful Tasks Siri can search, send, and book faster than you can. When Siri recognizes events in apps like Mail or Messages, it suggests adding them to your calendar.

Because what the tech giants are really interested in is combing our voices and our habits for data to learn what we want and predict what we need. To do that, the listening devices have to infiltrate deeper and deeper into our private lives and our daily interactions.

Except that these assistants are wired. All the time. Because even if those microphones are only on when you speak to them, as the big manufacturers claim, those microphones are still active, and increasingly surrounding us all. Right now, we can still question the design choices behind these devices, the way they direct our interactions, or how they embed themselves into our personal spaces. But many of us already spend our days within constant earshot of something that listens to us, all day, every day, from the moment we wake up until the moment we go to sleep.

To understand what happens with your voice when you talk to devices like these, you first need to know how these machines listen. When I speak, I make sounds that get picked up by an internal microphone in the computer.

There, the sound of my voice is converted into a digital signal, and then broken down into bite-sized chunks: w-u-t i-z th-uh k-oh-r-eh-s-p-AU-n-d-e-n-t. But digital audio is unwieldy and difficult to analyse. So these speech chunks are converted into a much more efficient, standardised data format: text.

They began to offer more reliable dictation, better language understanding, and integration with third-party skills. So, where did things go wrong? How did Apple lose its lead? The answer is complicated. If it wants to circumvent the messy problems of collecting user data, it can, simply by paying to generate this data.

Yes, analyzing random Siri interactions is helpful, but there are other ways to achieve the same improvements. A more convincing explanation is management dysfunction. In , The Information published a damning report on the comings-and-goings at team Siri. It noted that there was deep-seated disagreement within the company about how Siri should work is it a feature focused on search and retrieval, or an assistant that carries out complex tasks?

They were exacerbated by a lack of leadership and continuity in the Apple execs overseeing Siri. This seems to have slowed progress. Williamson, who refuted this claim, left Apple in after spearheading the disastrous Apple Maps launch. Scott Forstall, another executive involved in Siri and Apple Maps, departed that same year. Read into that what you will. While testing Siri in preparation for this story, I was consistently surprised by its failure to execute simple tasks on popular iOS apps.

Instead, Apple uses Siri to herd people back to its own inferior apps like a shepherd directing sheep off a cliff-face. When Schiller introduced Siri in , he stressed time and time again that Siri would understand users — that it knows what they are saying, just like a real person. If you treat voice interfaces as if they have the same level of fluency and knowledge as a human being, you will always be disappointed.

Ask Siri to turn on the lights, adjust the thermostat, and control all of the HomeKit products that you use in your home — even when you're away. With Siri Shortcuts, you can perform common tasks with the apps you use the most — all with just a tap or by asking Siri. Discover ready-made shortcuts that automate a variety of tasks. Or create custom shortcuts with multiple steps that you can use with your favorite apps. Siri availability, features, and commands varies by language, and country and region.

Learn which Siri features are supported in your country or region. What can I ask Siri? If Siri responds on another device.