Even Apple employees hate Siri and are skeptical of its future, new report says

Re:Even Apple employees hate Siri and are skeptical of its f... by khazhoux on Thursday April 27, 2023 @06:14PM (#35735240)

The accurate pronunciation in German is irrelevant. Siri is always constrained to one language (Settings > General > Language & Region), and when set to English you get English pronunciations.

Same way Siri understands the english “Los Angeles” even though the G sound is completely different from Spanish.

The english IPA for Bach is straightforward.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Even Apple employees hate Siri and are skeptical of its f... by nicky0 on Friday April 28, 2023 @02:20AM (#35738067)

You’re talking as if there is an anccepted standard English pronunciation of Bach. The only one I know is the German one which I would use when speaking English. Perhaps I would soften the ending.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Even Apple employees hate Siri and are skeptical of its f... by khazhoux on Friday April 28, 2023 @05:05AM (#35739057)

My point is that there's nothing particularly special about this name of foreign origin, compared to any other word. Every word has lots of variations in how they're pronounced.

The audio clip the person posted was for a true German pronunciation, which happened to be very different than how 99% of English-speakers would say it.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Even Apple employees hate Siri and are skeptical of its f... by cubefox on Friday April 28, 2023 @05:28AM (#35739195)

So how would you have to pronounce "Chopin" in "English"? This doesn't make sense. There aren't even consistent pronunciation rules for many genuine English words, like "ead" in "read" and "thread".

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Even Apple employees hate Siri and are skeptical of its f... by dividedbyzero on Friday April 28, 2023 @06:43AM (#35739624)

Lots of Americans seem to try to pronounce Bach the composer "correctly", which leads to batch, bash, buck, ... which is fine, the German hard "ch" is very hard to form for English throats, and it's always better and more polite to at least try than to simply pretend foreign words and names are just weirdly spelled English ones, but it's not as straightforward as with a John Bach from Ohio.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Even Apple employees hate Siri and are skeptical of its f... by yakubin on Saturday April 29, 2023 @12:36PM (#35754485)

> Siri is always constrained to one language

Not only Siri — the whole iOS. You can’t type a sentence switching languages in the middle, without changing the keyboard language all the time, if you have autocorrect enabled. It will change what you type into utter gibberish, even though without the “correcting” what you type is perfectly correct. This system is quite visibly designed by people who speak only one language and don’t understand that people may want to use multiple languages at the same time. The keyboard should support a mix of languages, instead of making a XOR between languages, because otherwise when it starts, it’s almost always in the wrong mode, and if it isn’t, it will almost certainly be wrong by the end of what I write.

[ Parent | on HN ]