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A comment on How Apple let Siri fall behind the Google Assistant and Alexa. Parent comment

Re:How Apple let Siri fall behind the Google Assistant and A... by Reason077 on Thursday March 15, 2018 @05:43AM (#16591448)
I often want to set a timer for exactly 50 minutes so I know when my laundry is done.

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.

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Re:How Apple let Siri fall behind the Google Assistant and A... by bjork on Thursday March 15, 2018 @09:39AM (#16592707)
I also have that problem, but I say 51 minutes instead.
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Re:How Apple let Siri fall behind the Google Assistant and A... by nagVenkat on Thursday March 15, 2018 @09:47AM (#16592776)
Do you have any accent? By that I mean are you a second language English speaker? I just presumed that it couldn’t understand my accent heavy speeech.
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Re:How Apple let Siri fall behind the Google Assistant and A... by Reason077 on Thursday March 15, 2018 @01:25PM (#16594797)
I'm a native English speaker, though whether I have an accent depends on your perspective! I can do either American or British somewhat convincingly, and I usually don't have any trouble being understood by Siri.

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?

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Re:How Apple let Siri fall behind the Google Assistant and A... by oarsinsync on Thursday March 15, 2018 @10:16AM (#16593016)
Americans think I sound British. British think I sound American. Siri fails less often when set to British instead of American for me, but still fails too often regardless.
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Re:How Apple let Siri fall behind the Google Assistant and A... by ghettoimp on Thursday March 15, 2018 @09:19AM (#16592535)
Maybe saying 49 or 51 would work...
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Re:How Apple let Siri fall behind the Google Assistant and A... by Reason077 on Thursday March 15, 2018 @01:19PM (#16594731)
It certainly does work, and I did that until I discovered the "Five zero" trick. It's just "Fifty" that it has a problem with!
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