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I purchase music outright because I'm old. I often buy from what at least used to be called the iTunes Music Store. The biggest advantage for me for doing so over, say, buying from Amazon or directly from the artist's site (which I often do, or buy from Bandcamp if available), is that Apple Music will stream those songs for me even if I didn't download them locally, so they're accessible any time I have an Apple device (or Windows!) and a network connection.
Well, almost. It doesn't work from my HomePod, you know, the device I spent a few hundred bucks on TO PLAY MUSIC.
All these phrases except maybe one used to work at some point. It used to be I could use the magic phrase "from my library" and get things to work, or say the name of a specific album. No longer!
And "shuffle my library" used to always work even when nothing else did. I'd sometimes get shuffle even when asking for something specific -- and Siri would tell me so before ignoring what I'd really requested ("Now playing your music library shuffled"). That shuffling the full library worked always drove me crazy because it'd tell me the music was there, Siri just wasn't going to play the way I wanted it.
Anyhow, the main course (Warning: this may say "Hey Siri" several times and light up as many Apple devices as you have within listening range):
Transcript:
Me: Hey Siri, play The Warning from my library.
Siri: The Warning Now Playing.
Also Siri: Sorry, there was a problem with Apple Music.
Me: Hey Siri, play Keep Me Fed.
Siri: Now playing Escapism by The Warning.
Me, silently: [Escapism? Isn't that the sixth song on the...]
Also Siri: Sorry, there was a problem with Apple Music.
Me: Hey Siri, play The Rolling Stones.
Siri: Here's The Rolling Stones.
Also Siri: Sorry, there was a problem with Apple Music.
Me: Hey Siri, shuffle songs from my... library.
Siri: Playing all songs, shuffled.
LONG PAUSE
Siri: Sorry, there was a problem with Apple Music.
I think that's a clear QA fail. Shouldn't these be well-established "user stories" by now? If they worked before, someone made it work. Did they do that on their own time or were they asked to? What happened to those tests? Why aren't those scenarios tested any more?
Like, I get it. I'm a dinosaur in a way that hasn't become cool again. I'm reminded of this Twitter ad I saw from the RIAA (boo! hiss!) last week (Oct 23rd):
It continues. On Apple's HomePod feedback page, the most recent HomePod OS version you can select is 16.5. Mine, after searching the Home app for a while, is apparently on 17.6 and is downloading 18 now. How much money does this company have again?
The contractor who spoke to The Guardian said that "the regularity of accidental triggers on the watch is incredibly high," and that some snippets were up to 30 seconds in length. Employees listening to Siri recordings are encouraged to report accidental activations as a technical problem, but aren't told to report about content.
This is completely believable, and gives the entire story some credence. My stupid watch is always shooting off Siri because I've bent my wrist back to pick up something or similar. Can't imagine what sorts of curses I've sent their way.
Question: Why did they think they needed to listen to "real" requests?
If I ran a company based on privacy, instead of listening in on 0.01% of users' calls to Siri, I'm getting thousands of my employees to dogfood Siri with on-premise iPhones and use those samples to make it better.
Believe me, Siri is still nascent enough you'll find plenty of issues to fix with just that. Just get it to the point that everyone working at Apple is Siri-ing through their days happily and you'll have a heck of a product.
Daring Fireball has some thoughts on why iPad sales are down:
By 1987 or 1988, it was easy to argue that the Mac was, hands-down, the best platform the world had ever seen for graphic designers and visual artists. By 1991 โ seven years after the original Mac โ I think it was inarguable...
Thatโs just not true for iPad. The iPad is a terrific platform for casual use. I think itโs better than a MacBook for reading and watching video. Itโs great for casual gaming. I know plenty of people who much prefer the iPad as a tool for writing. Not because iPad writing apps are more powerful, but rather because theyโre simpler, less distracting, and easier to focus upon. None of those are compelling reasons to upgrade an older iPad for a newer more powerful one. In fact, those are all good explanations for why owners of older iPads (especially starting around 2012โs iPad 4) see no reason to upgrade. [emphasis mine -mfn]
This begs the question, "Why do we feel we need to upgrade our phones so much more often than our tablets?"
There are lots of "obvious" reasons.
Your phone is the computer you always have with you.
This also dovetails nicely with, "Our phones get more use".
Better cameras
iPads, as annoying and obvious as folks are who do use them as cameras, aren't nearly as nice as point-and-shoot camera substitutes.
Service provider upgrade subsidies
iPhone 6 screen size, though that should have balanced by now.
Status symbols.
iPhones are public. iPads are private.
But I wonder if there's an even simpler practical explanation: When we use our phones, we're in a hurry. A few hundred milliseconds is a much bigger delay for typical phone usage than when you're relaxing/consuming on your iPad.
When I'm in a hurry, a faster processor/experience matters more.
Apple doesn't appear interested in developing a standalone Amazon Echo-like speaker utilizing Siri, as the company's vision is instead linked to devices like the iPhone, Apple Watch and AirPods.
Apple has "no apparent interest" in replicating the Alexa family of devices, according toTime's Tim Bajarin. Citing discussions with unnamed Apple executives, the future goal of the technology is to utilize Siri as an "omnipresent AI assistant across devices" rather than have a central hub.
File that away in the annuals of, "I believe I hadthat."
For instance, when I asked Siri on my Mac how long it would take me to get to work, it said it didnโt have my work address โ even though the โmeโ contact card contains a work address and the same synced contact card on my iPhone allowed Siri to give me an answer.
Similarly, on my iPad, when I asked what my next appointment was, it said โSorry, Walt, somethingโs wrongโ โ repeatedly, with slightly different wording, in multiple places on multiple days. But, using the same Apple calendar and data, Siri answered correctly on the iPhone.
These sort of glaring inconsistencies are almost as bad as universal failures. The big problem Apple faces with Siri is that when people encounter these problems,ย they stop trying.
Exactly right. I've had it do the same thing when I ask Siri to give me directions home, usually because I want to know if there's enough traffic to go an alternate route, and I get the same, "Who are you?!" complaint. But if I open Maps, "Home" is usually the first location listed.
QA sucks at Apple. I'm no longer politely questioning it.
Spend ten million (he said figuratively) and get the best QA staff in the business, and make sure there's no silo making QAing app interactions an issue. If Maps borks like this, the QA team "for Maps" has to be able to hold Siri and Contacts (or whatever else) accountable. No software ships until this blocking bug is fixed.
Good QA will think of and try these sorts of pretty obvious, yet creative, use (not edge, simply "use") cases before you ship.
Apple's limited Siri API hurts voice recognition in apps because no third party is going to provide developers with a more flexible one.
Alexa just gives you text to parse. This is perfect. Let me screw it up. It's my app. Apple, on the other hand, limits Siri to a few "Supported Domains and Intents".
Wow, that limits voice recognition. I'm hopeful that this is just the beta, essentially, but if they continue to force all voice recognition into their own backend, and will only give you the results in some sort of logical flowchart, Alexa and Google are going to hand Apple its hat with digital assistants. I understand that this allows us to skip translation, but is that really that big a deal? Smart folk are internationalizing (there's a better word for that; sorry) their apps now, translating labels and other text throughout. I also get that Apple might do a better job with grammar, so that there are lots of ways to get across a command in natural speech rather than forcing a strange, app-specific grammar. I don't feel that's a big win.
If I have to speak to Overcast, my podcast manager, like, "Overcast, start playlist Sports" and can't say, "Hey, play sports on Overcast," that's fine by me.
Also working in Apple's favor: iPhone owners already use Siri for other
simple tasks. About 42 percent of iPhone owners turn to Siri at least
once a month, according to ComScore.
Is it just me, or is that number waaaay under where you would've expected it'd be?
I try to tell folks to use Siri for directions, which it's pretty good at providing, and which seems to, surprisingly, be a difficult thing for folks to do on their own "by hand". I can almost get it to text for me too, especially when I'm plugged in in the car. "Hey, Siri. Text [pseudo Siri-phonetic pronounciation] blah blah some message blah."
But half of iPhone users not even playing with Siri once a month? That seems like a fail. I wonder how many iPhone users in that survey still have iPhones that can't use Siri. It can't be many. Forty-two percent, though a famous number, here is a real fail.
That said, the point of the CNet piece -- that Siri will be AppleMusic's differentiator -- is interesting. Their example "play the top 10 alternative songs now" is actually pretty compelling. It's Pandora stations with potentially static, user-defined rules on demand. That's pretty cool. Of course, see why I think Apple's (naturally?) moving to streaming music to keep your grain of salt handy.
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