I bought a HomePod to see if it could do everything I need and oddly enough, the Echo does a better job integrating with my iOS-based grocery list (AnyList). With the Echo, I can say "Alexa, add eggs" and it will either add eggs to AnyList or tell me if eggs are already on my list. With Siri I have to say something like "Hey Siri, using AnyList, add eggs to my grocery list".
I use the built-in Lists app, so I just say, "Hey, Siri, add ginger ale to my groceries list." Hopefully alternate defaults will come, the way iOS is slowly embracing alternate defaults for other functions.
That said, about 50% of the time when I say, "Hey, Siri, add sandwich bread to my groceries list," she responds, "OK, I've added those two things to your list."
Do you mean the reminders app or another one?
I think in an old version of iPhone OS or OSX it was called "Lists." That must be what I remembered.
A -5° Centigrade winter daytime temp might be completely normal and expected in my area.
However, Siri will love to tell you, like a long-lost distant relative from tropical climes, about how terrible and how uncomfortable it is.
Maybe it's regional.
Siri used to do that to me, too, which was annoying. But she stopped offering opinions on the weather about two years ago.
Disclaimer- I have never worked on Siri and don’t know. But this smacks of “hard coding” the common cases, something that apple is much more likely to do than google or some of the other big tech companies because of how poorly it scales. For me this is not evidence at all that Apple has caught up in the ML space, just that they have good enough speech to text and better UX people willing to invest in identifying and manually outlining a lot of cases.
But one of the things I was most impressed about Siri on the HomePod is it seemed to take context (not sure if that is the right word in this case...) into account more often.
For example:
On Alexa regardless of if I asked "how cold is it", "what is the temperature", "is it raining", "what is the weather"... etc etc etc. It would always say the same long weather response.
On my HomePod if I ask "How cold is it" I get "I don't find that particularly cold, it is cloudy and 72 degrees".
If I ask "what is the temperature" I get "its 72 degrees right now".
If I ask "is it raining" "no, I don't think its raining right now".
Then finally if I ask what the weather is I get the full thing.
Does Siri lack a lot of smarts to ask random questions and give the answer? yes, But I found when I switched to HomePod the things I normally do (like weather, timers, and similar) Siri did better.
Like I said, maybe Alexa has gotten better about this. But that is my experience. So for me Siri was better for my use cases. Home commands could use a lot of work, but that seems like an issue that no one has figured out how to make it actually better than flicking a light switch (outside of remote stuff).