- Cooking & laundry timers

- Reminders (remind me to do X when I get home)

- Directions (Take me to the nearest X, take me home, etc)

- Checking hours of business (what time does X close today)

- Initiating phone calls (Call X)

- Checking weather (is it going to snow today? How cold is it right now?)

- Conversions (what's X ounces to ml)

- Quick stock checks (what's X stock price)

- Playing music around the house (play X on the kitchen speakers)

Additionally, I've found myself using Android's voice recording capabilities to dictate text all the time. It's just so much faster than typing or swiping.

I haven't an iPhone for a few years, so I can't compare with what Siri is capable of today.

Going through those:

- Cooking & laundry timers - Yes. Works well

- Reminders (remind me to do X when I get home) - I find Apple geofenced alerts to be unreliable.

- Directions (Take me to the nearest X, take me home, etc) - Pretty good, search isn't as good as Google, but good enough these days.

- Checking hours of business (what time does X close today) - Never tried, doubt it would work.

- Initiating phone calls (Call X) - Yes - Works well

- Checking weather (is it going to snow today? How cold is it right now?) - Yes, works well

- Conversions (what's X ounces to ml) - Never tried. Just tried now - works OK

- Quick stock checks (what's X stock price) - As above works OK, says whether there has been a fall or rise.

- Playing music around the house (play X on the kitchen speakers)- works very well.

I've actually been super impressed with Siri. You can have it call you an uber, get the leading scorer from your favorite hockey team, contextually ask followup questions about a person you were searching, etc. I haven't used Siri in a long time (besides timers, weather, etc) and it has come so far since I did.

But I don't know if there's enough incentive for apps to add an assistant interface. How easy is it to add commands on your app that it will accept via assistant? Are there common APIs or structures for this to shift the incentives, allow it to proliferate app by app, rather than waiting on the assistant developers to manually do each one?

After that we need to go back to Aza Raskin's project, uh, Ubiquity? Anyone could build little scripts, verbs, that helped build a natural language input from the ground up. That's how we get to stuff like, "Hey Google, take a screenshot of news.ycombinator.com and email it to Joe."

Maybe app actions are only available on Pixel devices.

I want every app to start thinking about voice ux, but that's probably down to the individual apps, and you're right that some do. I can play some things on Stitcher, say, though I can't remember if I have to use podcast names specifically or if I can use my playlist names.

Some Google apps don't seem to support it though.

Ok Google, log my weight on Google fit as X? Search results page.

Ok Google, play (my playlist name) on Google Play: plays unrelated radio station inspired by my playlist name, with sometimes comical results.

I'm sure it will improve with time.

I think once somebody finds a good API for that, it will be a watershed moment.

Amazon Alexa has apps called "skills", but they expose their own voice interface which is always inconsistent.

I really wish the manufacturers would only have a few features, like weather or timer or location (home, work, school) that were truly bulletproof in execution. It feels like they are trying to do too much most of the time when I just want them to not suck consistently so I can actually use them reliably.

One thing it can't do is 'remind me to do X when I leave work'. Can siri?

If I usually leave work around 5-6 and I start packing up my bag, that could be a signal.

For a lot of people it would be effective.

For instance, if I don't know what time aim getting off of work and I wanted a reminder to call my wife when I got to the car, it could do that completely accurately based on phone connecting to the car. It could only guess about doing something before I left work.

Unexpectedly, this can sometimes be a positive too. "Hey siri, turn my lights <pink/orange/purple/blue/red/white>" has on multiple occasions been interpreted as "Hey siri, turn my lights", which then results in the lights being turned off. This is hugely entertaining when you're demonstrating your new Philips Hue bulbs over FaceTime, and the person on the other end now just sees your camera go black instead.

But siri always interprets "Fifty" as "Fifteen". Pretty much every single time, it always makes the same mistake, no matter how clearly or slowly I try to pronounce it. I have to say "Hey Siri, set a timer for five zero minutes" to get it to pick it up accurately.

I suspect the problem with "50" is that whatever ML underpins it is heavily tuned/biased towards "15" because a lot of people probably set 15 minute timers all the time. 50 minute timers are much less common, I suspect?

That is assuming they were trusted to work on it instead of report to status meetings, or meetings to their dotted line manager, etc. Apple was built around Steve. It’s going to take a while.

The Google alternative is, from what I understand, something that just works.

Doing that bit of theatre, with some humor, pop culture relevant things, even just good responses, appears to matter more to people than "it can do it", and "it actually did it" hit rates.

OK Google needs a name.

Google is this big, smart thing. People get that.

But, "Ask Siri" has less friction and appears easier to identify with than giving an order to a corporation is, "OK Google."

Maybe just, "Hey Google" would make a subtle difference.

And, in typical Apple fashion, "Ask Siri" is all you need to know to attempt it.

Further, discovery has error. If that can be best guess, combined with some fun, people will play.

"OK Google" lacks these human friendly connotations.

A name would be a follow, hard for Google, but... If it were me, I would flat out own that, get the name, and run ADS. "We hear you... meet [name not common, familiar sounding, friendly, easy to say.]"

There has to be either an old world name with good connotations, or a variant that is catchy, fun, gender fluid.

Lol, use goog. Mostly kidding, but a tiny bit serious.

Better, much better is out there.

Or, let the user name it. Why not?

"OK Google, can I call you inigo?"

"Sure, I will answer to inigo. And OK Google when I'm not properly introduced, OK?"

Got downvotes, but it seems to me Google has the superior product. True for me and how I use it anyway.

Add in a little personification, and it's nothing but win, IMHO.

So far, I've seen people like the bit of theatre related to Siri. Whether we do or not isn't necessarily the point.

Supposedly these devices have low-power chips that can only recognize certain pre-configured names (like "OK, Google"), and then wake up the main CPU to do the rest.

I always found the phrase ok Google simply awkward to pronounce

In my kitchen, I can ask Google Home "how far is X" .. and it responds with a distance/time and pops up a notification on my phone to initiate Google Maps navigation to the target. Useful if I'm in getting ready to go there.

Does Apple's HomePod have any such continuity with an iPhone?

It's bonkers to me that this is still a limitation on a phone that lets me track a dozen-plus world clocks, as though it's a more common use case.

Go try the Google assistant and get back to us that Siri is equal.

http://h4labs.org/siri-next-monday-isnt-christmas/

Another one is when Siri tries to update an existing reminder when I say “create reminder”

I have Apple Music and I’ll often use my little Echo Dot when I want to play a song just because I can simply talk to Alexa from across the room and it will hear me.

I've yet to meet anyone who got siri to do anything, let alone useful, on the 5th try. I can mumble microcontroller part numbers to google, or other odd non-standard words/phrases and 90% of the time its correct on the first try; half the time i'm astonished that it even was able to figure out what i said

It's how reliable it is when it does it. I use both iOS and Android, and Google Assistant is so much more reliable that I find I use it. With Siri I find I end up having to intervene so often it isn't worth it.

I do have an Australian accent, so maybe that is a factor.

I carry an iPhone on my person but I use Android in my car. I don't ever find myself using Siri, but I use Google Assistant a lot. I tried using CarPlay a few times but the voice recognition just wasn't there. I distinctly remember trying to get it to navigate to a restaurant called Da Nang Quan and it just was stumped. Google can recognize these kinds of things. I've also noticed it has no problem recognizing the spoken commands of my young children which generally speaking Siri can't figure out at all.

I tried again just now, this is what I got: Me: "What time does Ike's sandwich close?" Siri heard: "What time does Eichs sandwich close" Siri responded: "Hmmm... I don't see any hours for Rick's Sandwich Shop on Elkins St, Boston"

Things like this is why I've all but stop using Siri.

I've lived here in the US for 25 years and I notice the phrase every single time. :-)

More importantly, I was distinguishing because while Siri should be able to to understand various accents, it's struggled with that. When it launched, there were only two English variants (US and UK), so if you were a native Indian or Australian English speaker (for example) your experience would suffer. Now, Siri has support for 9 different English variants so they've clearly come a long way, but I remember it wasn't always the case.

Obviously that's "no accent."

(I use it for reminders. That seems to work. Looking up anything is useless.)

If the sum of 20 years of voice technology is a glorified stopwatch, you got to wonder...

This confirms my experience so far with Siri.

It isn't that the google assistant is more featured packed, more so that it just works much better. Especially with slightly more complex queries.

This is a common confusion among iPhone users. I suspect the reason is that if all you're used to is Siri (and it's myriad disappointments), it's hard to conceive of the the quantum leaps that is Google Assistant in product polish and usefulness.

First and foremost is the near flawless voice recognition. I, with my India accent even, can just say things to my Android device (and now, my new google home) it just ... gets it. It's spooky.

Then, after it recognizes the question/request correctly, it is very likely to take the correct action with a high enough probability that it's now almost a surprise to hear "Sorry I don't now how to do that yet" when it does happen.

Outside of the active queries, there are things it does automatically that are at the level of what a particularly attentive human assistant might do for you.

It'll check your calendar and remind you that you should start driving for your 4pm appointment because the traffic is unusually heavy on 101 today.

Or that your flight tomorrow morning has been cancelled. It knows about your flight because of the confirmation email in your gmail account.

Remember, you have to take no action for this sort of reminders. Just have to opt in when assistant is setting itself up on your new phone.

There are myriad other such examples. It has saved my bacon numerous times. We're truly living in the future.

I have used all three and can say from personal experience the Google Assistant is head and shoulders in front of the other two in UX.

Alexa and now Google Home can integrate themselves into your whole life. Alexa is the primary interface for the home automation at my home and my girlfriend's. Her 9 y/o kids can use it. Our 67 y/o mothers can use it. We've got a baker's dozen of Alexa-enabled speakers between us, covering all of our living spaces and half the bathrooms.

They get used constantly.

Many of our use cases are "trivial" but having a voice assistant everywhere instead of tied to phones / tablets greatly changes their utility.

And the quantity of articles complaining about siri would seem to back up the idea that siri is getting used a lot more - Google Assistant is certainly not perfect, it's got some glaring flaws [1]. If people were actually using it, they'd be complaining. The lack of press coverage about Google Assistant's weak points is not a good thing.

[1]https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/03/14/10-stupidly-simple-...

Really the only thing you can't do with Siri that I'm aware of is home automation. But I could be wrong about that.

That said, for engineers in the crowd I know that I and others get around it by making a HomeKit RPi adapter for things that don't support it...

Apple won’t certify them, but there’s not yet a mass market for secure IoT devices (which would necessarily cost more due to the extra engineering required). It’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem.

> That said, for engineers in the crowd I know that I and others get around it by making a HomeKit RPi adapter for things that don't support it...

Yep, they're using HomeBridge. [0]

I'm planning on doing this for my garage door (with a little WiFi dev board) and for a video doorbell (with a RPi with camera). Others have used HomeBridge with a cheap $20 Chinese IP camera to do the same thing, although you have to install an alternate firmware if you don't want the camera to phone home to China... :O

[0]: https://github.com/nfarina/homebridge

For all other scenes I usually use the physical hue dimmer button because I’m standing.

I found at least one measurement report: As of July 2017 Verto Analytics showed Siri on top[1] with 41.4M unique users per month (but falling), and Alexa with only 2.6M (but rising fast).

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/11/siri-usage-and-engagement-...

When I got mine, I was trapped in some Siri -> Lock Screen -> Siri combination. "Siri go away" and "Siri show me the home screen" didn't help either. I just wanted to get on the home screen but since there is no Back-Button...well it's disabled now.

I hear now there's an unofficial bridge (runs as a NodeJS service) called Homebridge which might get Harmony working with Siri, and Lutron has newer lights not using Z-Wave that are Homekit compatible, but when I was shopping for all this stuff several years ago Siri /HomeKit support was abysmal.

It also helps that Echo's microphones and speech recognition is much better at far distances, with background noise, than "Hey Siri" (and assuming I don't have my phone in my pocket). At this point, I pretty much only use Siri when I'm in the car, and that's the environment where it seems to perform the worst (long delays to start listening, frequent misunderstandings, request failures).

I use it for all sorts of things that I would never try to get Siri to do.

It's a situation when I can't (well, shouldn't) use the phone's UI, so it's great to ask it to:

-find a place and check its hours of operation

-navigate to said place

-find a gas station along the way

-etc.

On an occasion, I've asked it to add things to a calendar.

As a lazy person, I prefer to do things with the minimal number of steps. Scheduling things in a calendar requires an inordinate amount of clicks. On the other hand, it's something that a CLI could be well-suited for. For such things, voice control is natural.

That requires machine learning, which requires data, which requires data collection, and the closest one to Google there isn't Apple or Amazon, it's Facebook.

We also have a 4k Chromecast and a Google home.

Just buy, plug in and log in. She already used Google photos.

The "character", theatre, framing, if you will, with Siri is superior.

Few people in my circles use the Amazon device at present.

Somehow, people like Siri. Siri is an agent in their minds and that is how they treat Siri.

The "OK Google" is one too, but not as well personified.

If I were to hazard a gut guess, based on an anecdotal sample, personification, as well as relevance to pop culture are big draws and can make up for technical gaps.

Personally, it's no contest. I use Google voice constantly. Works well enough for me to continue to invest in the experience.