I recognise the frustration; weirdly, for me I get all the errors with Alexa, and almost none with Siri, but the near daily experience of "Alexa, Küche auf" "Ich kann nicht 'Küche' auf Spotify finden" when we don't even have Spotify means I totally empathise.

My worst ever experience with Siri...

Me: Remind me at 8am to put X in the kids' school bags

Siri: I'm sorry, I can't set reminders in the past

Me: 8am tomorrow you fucking idiot

At 8am the next morning I got a reminder on my phone that just said "You fucking idiot".

Siri might be secretly a super AI that is lowkey trolling you

That's exactly what I thought when it happened.

Me: One hundred twenty grams in ounces

Siri: Calling Emergency Services

Me: frantic swiping to cancel

Surely you mean “ducking”? :)

Google's home assistants treat timers and alarms as different things entirely but I mentally don't. "Set a timer for x minutes" and "set an alarm for x minutes" are conceptually the same to me when I'm in the kitchen. But if you ask for timers, it will only give you timers, and if you ask for alarms it will only give you alarms.

I use the non-display speakers so I can't even view the stuff.

I actually do treat them very differently on my Home Mini. I want them to be different in the following ways:

- Timers can be set to the second (2 minutes 30 seconds), alarms are only to the minute (5:00) (it already works this way, I think)

- A timer noise should be immediate and jarring (so you can rush out of the other room to pull the thing out of the oven before it burns), alarms should start quiet and harmonious and only gradually increase in volume and obnoxiousness as needed to wake you up (sadly, few alarms are like that, but Google timer/alarm sounds are different)

- Ideally you want to be able to give timers names when you set them ("oven", "stockpot", "toaster oven") when you're using multiple, that are repeated when they go off (Google doesn't do this). You don't need this with alarms

- Alarms need a snooze option. Timers don't

While they both involve a sonic alert after a certain amount of time, their use cases are so different that they really are totally separate features.

Alarms (at least on Apple systems) are permanent, timers are ephemeral. My wife is the same as you and constantly sets alarms instead of timers - I recently looked at the settings of our kitchen HomePod and found several hundred alarms, all switched off.

Timers are permanent on iOS 17 betas. You can give them labels, which I assume Siri would understand badly.

Oh no, that sounds horrible

The biggest headache with Google's ecosystem is lack of "Timer Groups."

They have speaker groups (that work well), but if you have two+ Google Home/Hub/Mini devices in a single space asking for a timer will add it randomly to one of the devices, not the room or a group, and it won't always display on the Hub.

For example I have an open-plan kitchen, two Google Home Max speakers, and a Hub (display) on the counter. If I ask for a timer, it MIGHT go to the Hub or it MIGHT go to either of the two Home Max speakers.

Cancelling it involves figuring out which device took it, and standing close to it (or it just won't cancel). This is a really obvious and strange oversight, as Google Home's ecosystem supports "rooms" by default.

I was recently pleasantly surprised when I said, "Siri, set a timer for 7pm" and Siri responded by a) informing me timers couldn't be set for a time, and b) finding and enabling my cooking alarm which is typically set for 7pm, and telling me so.

The truly saavy version would have calculated the time left until 7pm and set a timer for that many minutes, however.

I have never, ever considered timers and alarms to be the same thing. If nothing else, a timer happens after a specified period of time. An alarm happens at a specific time.