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.