There's an Ike's Sandwiches like literally 30 feet from my office in San Jose, and I always like to ask Siri when it closes. To this day, I've probably tried on a dozen occasions and it has never once gotten it right. I'm a native English speaker with no accent.

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.

OT but what do you mean by "English speaker with no accent"? Clearly every person has an accent, and every system that understands language must be able to understand the various accents that people have.

In the US, people say "no accent" to mean what the rest of the world calls an American Accent (even though American Accents change with region, just like any country). It's a very US-centric way of looking at things, but means no harm.

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

Right, you caught me :) what I really meant to say is American English speaker with no strong regional markers (i.e. Southern, New York). Maybe slightly Midwest, but I haven't been back in decades so it's pretty weak.

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.

You know. They mean "an accent like everyone else had where I grew up."

Obviously that's "no accent."

There is no such store as "Ike's Sandwiches". There's "Ike's Place", and there's "Ike's Love and Sandwiches". You might have better luck if you use it's actual name.

That was part of my point though. Siri should be smart enough to understand my meaning (and Apple heavily marketed that aspect of it). If I put "Ike's Sandwiches" in Google (or even Apple Maps) they both know what I mean. Siri somehow thinks I'd be interested in a restaurant over a thousand miles away.

Siri has made me feel like an idiot so many times I don't even try any more. Fool me once...

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

We bought an amazon device to use as a kitchen timer. It sits right next to where everyone charges their iPhones. Nobody uses Siri. It’s sad. I want to love her, but I honestly can’t remember the last time she was useful, she only works with apples’ ecosystem (and I refuse to use maps it’s tried to kill me on multiple occasions), and I can’t honestly remember the last time I was impressed with her progress forward as a tech.

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

Using Siri as a timer is one of the more common things people do with Siri. Why would you buy a whole different device just for timers?

So I just tried to replicate the query for the restaurant Da Nang Quan (which is in Oakland California) and this time it actually makes a sensible interpretation of my question ("Danang Quan") once out of five times, and got close another time ("Danang Kwan") and got complete nonsense the other three times. Unfortunately all three of the results it tried to give me for the nearly-right questions were in Vietnam which again is not anything like the answer I needed.

This confirms my experience so far with Siri.