Thank you for saying this, you've just made me realise they share all the problems of text adventures while having none of the excitement.

So long for muscle memory (oh and for consiseness, it's worse in French).

Anyways, that's the prime reason there's no list: either they want to change the commands willy-nilly, or they don't know them because that's whatever the model's learned.

Only saying "15 minutes" initiates a timer for that long.

This goes even deeper in the "undiscoverable commands" issue at hand.

"notify me in 15 minutes" feels natural and casual, and how I'd expect to interact with modern voice assistants. "set a 15 minutes timer" feels overly formal and redundant (it does not help that in French, a timer is "minuteur", so you repeat the "minutes" sound twice), and how I'd expect to interact with old voice assistants. This new one is just some hidden trial-and-error thing deep in Siri that's likely an engineer that likes cooking that added it as a shortcut.

Among the many shortcomings of Siri is that it seems as if it's not good with verbs. I've learned to avoid them as much as possible. Put another way, it's better with nouns, so I focus on them. I guess that's why

"15-minute timer" and

"15 minutes"

work well. But similarly, I wanted to use the stopwatch the other day. Not something I ever really do. Just saying, "Stopwatch" got it open. And testing now on some non-Apple apps also worked (in case Siri has some built-in pro-Apple bias). One was WhatsApp. The other was an app for an insurance and banking company. That one, just saying its name opened the contact card I have for the company. That's fair. Trying again, and saying "company name app" opened the app.

Of course, sometimes the verbs are necessary. But I've had more success when I could avoid them. Do note that I say all this using a Siri-only phone that is too old for any of Apple Intelligence that may get mixed in with Siri.

But the reality is it doesn’t work and users have to specifically learn the few things it can do.

Regarding the "notify" vs "timer", I had a very similar experience with a friend. I went to a bakery, and she asked me to get her some kind of pastry. To me, she meant some kind of bread. Queue confused faces on both sides when she asked where her stuff was. Sure, it's still in the broad "baked goods" category, just like a reminder and a timer. This was in France, both living in major cities 200 km apart. It's not like some extreme variation of English from the other side of the world.

Turns out it's actually already a word: having the proper form or shape —used of minerals whose crystalline growth has not been interfered with

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/idiomorphic

That seems to fit amazingly well here too.

Likely related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance#As_perceived_action..., but it's a jargon word most tech people and others don't know, and it creates debates about what it means among those that do know it.

I usually say something like it should be obvious it's clickable, or obvious what it does, when it comes up.

> Affordances are what an object can do (truth). Perceived affordances are what one thinks an object can do (perception). Signifiers make affordances clearer (closing the gap between truth and perception). Signifiers often reduce number of possible interpretations and/or make intended way of using an object more explicit.

> A grey link on the screen might afford clicking (truth). But you might perceive it just as a non-interactive label (perception). Styling it as a button (background, shadow etc.) is a signifier that makes it clearer that the link can be clicked.

I don't think there's any more widely known terms here, and not any used within general tech audiences. I'd like it if there was a useful shorthand too but devs/users/clients are probably going to stick with e.g. "I couldn't tell that was a button" because the above have failed to catch on.

"Visual cues" feels accurate enough. I immediately understand "Buttons should look like buttons".

"Skeuomorphism" has caught on. It's not guessable but then it saves quite a few words so helps with communication. It probably got picked up by some tech news/blog sites and reached critical mass because skeuomorphism vs flat design resonates with people.