Re:How Apple let Siri fall behind the Google Assistant and A...
by happertiger on Thursday March 15, 2018 @04:58AM
(#16591276)
Smartthings is the platform to beat for Apple. It’s simple, easy and incredibly powerful. I can’t understand why Apple doesn’t apply their magic to the model and just knock it out of the park. They have all of the pieces and the ux experience to make it exceptional.
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).