Siri Is So Bad at Everything
A Reddit post titled "Siri is so bad at everything" sparked a Hacker News discussion about Apple's voice assistant. The thread drew immediate attention from the HN community, with users weighing in on Siri's persistent failures across tasks. The linked page itself could not be fetched, leaving only the discussion thread as context.
- scrumper
The whole thing is buggered. My latest, in car, on 26.6.2 with phone connected via bluetooth. I hold the voice button on my steering wheel down to activate Siri:
"Call Fred."
"You'll need to unlock your phone for that."
"Call Fred."
"You'll need to unlock your phone for that."
"Call Fred."
"OK, calling Fred."
Phone is locked in my pocket the entire time. Like, make your damn mind up. Every time I try to call from the car now I have to ask it at least twice, usually three times.
And a completely baffling one recently, not even anonymizing names, also in car:
"Call George."
"OK adding L.S.D. by Hallucinogen to your Liked Songs playlist."
WTAF.
- post_break
Here's my tiny anecdote about Siri. It's so garbage I had to name my garage door "The garage door" because without the extra THE it would often refuse or tell me that device can't be opened.
Siri needs to be spoonfed the most basic things, and it's not getting any better. Google doesn't get any passes since my Google Home appears to be getting alzheimer's after the Gemini "upgrade".
- 8ytecoder
I’ve heard a wide variety of excuses including privacy as the reason Siri sucks. Truth is, if you can’t get your assistant to add 5 minutes to a running timer, it’s a product failure. It has nothing to do with privacy or AI or LLM or MCP. It’s just a bad product. Either the product managers don’t know how their users use it or they do but the engineers can’t easily change the code to add functionality or the leaders don’t care enough to prioritize basic features.
This finally works in iOS 27. Something Alexa has been able to do for what 5 years? Probably longer.
- Jeremy1026
Apple Intelligence broke the ability for Siri to run a shortcut that I use daily. I have a shortcut named, "What's for dinner?" I used to be able to activate Siri and says, "What's for dinner?" and it would set off to my personal mealie server, use an API key to fetch the information, then speak the result. Now, Siri looks through my messages and finds a dinner reservation from OpenTable from months ago and declares that to be fact.
- speak_plainly
I was optimistic that Apple would get this right but Siri AI is yet another embarrassment in a long continuing series of Apple embarrassments.
I went from being overly exuberant on AI to now thinking it probably should be banned outright. From a consumer perspective, the tech industry is a dead end and the internet now is at best a pipeline for content for your TV and sound system and the rest feels like it should be ignored and avoided.
Unless there are radical changes on the horizon, there is no way I’m investing any more in the Apple ecosystem and I’m saying this as a former Apple employee and fan.
- Legend2440
The only voice assistant that has impressed me recently is the new ChatGPT Voice Mode with background reasoning. It's miles ahead of the other assistants.
The only downside is that it lacks the OS integration of Gemini or Siri. I've been trying to figure out a way to trigger it with the button on my pixel earbuds, but no success - seems it only works with Gemini.
- nsbk
Siri is the only thing in the whole universe which can make me rage. Not computers, not $dayjob, not my car, not getting lost while riding a rally in the desert, not people. Siri. Only Siri can do that.
- neya
I'm sure there will be someone to defend Apple here. "Maybe it's a privacy thing"
What a pile of garbage Siri is.