Has my time come? Tried it a couple of times, still the same odd demonic voice. Not sure what to do now

This new Siri AI is absolutely horrible—somehow worse than ever! Mind you, I have an Apple Watch Ultra 4, and even something as simple as setting a timer has become a frustrating experience. And on the rare occasion Siri actually understands the request, it takes 3–4 business days to respond.

Hey Siri, text message My Wife.

Last 5 years: “What would you like to say?”

Today: “You’ll have to do that from your iPhone when you’re not driving.”

So I picked up my fucking phone while driving and texted My Wife.

What setting do I have to change? I don’t even have a Driving focus mode, but was plugged in to CarPlay. I don’t have the AI Siri beta toggled on.

I listen to streaming radio and podcast. When doing so, I ask Siri to do something and once completed, the Siri bubble stays open and won't resume playing what I'm listening to.

I like the ability to keep talking but I needs to recognize I'm not saying anything else faster.

I'm here to assure you all that Apple has heard your multiple complaints about the latest Siri update. John Ternus and the Board have appointed me as the new head of department overlooking Siri and I can say with confidence most of your complaints will be addressed in the coming months. My team will be working diligently in close contact with you, the user, to fine tune Siri and make it into the product you all expect from us.

A bit about me; here's a list of accomplishments in my previous roles:

• 2024: Microsoft Windows Team - Lead Product Manager for Copilot keys; replaced the dedicated Menu key on new keyboards with a forced Copilot shortcut button.
• 2023-2024: Vision Pro team - I was in charge of headset weight and pricing strategy
• 2020–2021: Netflix Product Strategy - Proposed the global rollout of the password sharing crackdown and household location checks.
• 2019–2020: Spotify Design Team - UX Manager behind replacing simple heart/like buttons with multi-step menus and forced TikTok-style video feeds
• 2015-2018: Macbook team - I pitched the touchbar on Macbooks and led the butterfly keyboard design. Also headed ergonomic testing for the Magic Mouse 2 bottom charging port.
• 2014–2015: Apple Music team - Chief Distribution Lead who pushed a U2 album into every single user's iTunes library without permission.

Hope you will trust me with this new mission

/s

When I’m driving using Apple CarPlay, and I get a new text, not only will it read the new text, but it often reads an old text that was sent weeks ago by a different person that Siri has already read numerous times. It’s so aggravating. And often times I’ll have it read the new text, yet the new text message red dot icon won’t go away. This thing is so incredibly buggy.

New Siri is absolutely abysmal.

"Hey Siri, call Mary"
[7 seconds pass]
"Calling Mary..."
[5 seconds pass]
"Calling Mary"
[nothing happens]

This used to work instantly, and flawlessly.

When I first upgraded to SiriAI, I was genuinely blown away by my early tests, so much so that I posted about my early experience with it here.

Since then I've seen post after post saying about how Siri/SiriAI is terrible, and confusion on how if it's "built on gemini" why gemini is so much better than it.

But I feel there's a bit of confusion about how Gemini is/was involved, and also in what ways SiriAI has improved over old-school Siri.

Firstly, SiriAI wasn't built on top of Gemini, it was distilled from it. Which effectively means Apple created a basic LLM and then used Gemini to teach SiriAI how to manage itself and become what it is today. It's not just a carbon copy of it, nor is Siri sending queries to Gemini and just adding an Apple flavour to the response.

But I think the big thing is the confusion around how SiriAI can be used.

SiriAI now can be used as a general LLM, just as with Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude, answering general questions and queries. This is a new functionality over oldschool Siri, but it is certainly NOT where it's strengths lie. It may be pretty good at that side of things fairly often, but you'll usually get a better response over a more dedicated LLM which has undergone countless iterations to get to where it is today.

SiriAI's strength lies in personal data and contextual awareness. The ability to query about something you, photographed, messaged, or emailed, without remembering what the original source was, and that is it's super power (as per my original post linked above).

I have spent a long time living quite deep in the Google ecosystem, and despite having Gemini Pro in my gMail, I can spend an infuriating amount of time with back-and-forths talking to Gemini trying to access some information from my inbox, and never get there. But a single question to SiriAI can provide the answer in no time at all.

If I need to ask something about myself or my actions, then SiriAI on my phone is absolutely my go-to, but if I have any other questions, it's generally Gemini or Claude (depending on the specific requirements) that I'll turn to.

Now, I specified there SiriAI on my phone, as it works great on there. But SiriAI both on my Macbook and my Apple Watch leave much to be desired.

It seems the indexing on my macbook has done a worse job than on my phone and often struggles to respond to simple contextual things that my phone answers immediately. Also if I ask Siri on my Macbook to set a reminder, or to remind me about something, it just responds saying "home assistant doesn't have a reminder for that" (if you know how to set it to use the apple reminders app by default please do let me know).

But it's on my watch that's the most frustrating. I use siri on my watch countless times a day to set reminders. However, since the upgrade, 8/10 times I will invoke Siri (either by long-pressing the side button or tapping the on-screen Siri button), it show's that it's listening to me and I'll say my piece. But more often than not, after a few seconds, it just stops listening and doesn't respond at all, and even if it does listen to me, half the time it will ask follow up questions for clarifications on what I've said, despite the fact it's managed understanding me perfectly with the exact same phrases for the last two years, with the old Siri.

So yeah, SiriAI on the iPhone, is a truly powerful tool for contextual use-cases and it's night and day compared to anything else I've tried if used in that way. For more general stuff it's ok at best. On the Mac, there are some really useful applications for it, but even with some of the things that work well on my phone, my macbook drops the ball, and SiriAI on the watch is just beyond aweful!

If anyone has any suggestions for potential workarounds or fixes for the issues I've mentioned, I'd love to hear them.

I have no idea how I ever lived without this.

That's amoosing.

Some additional thoughts: I have both Gemini and Siri. And supposedly, the new Siri is built on Gemini. So in theory, it should give very similar responses to Gemini, right? But that’s not what I’ve found. I’ve tested both repeatedly and have noticed that Gemini is just way more accurate and smarter all around. It’s not even remotely close.

I just don’t understand why? I’ve asked the same questions to both and a lot of the times, Siri just blatantly gives the wrong answer confidently. I’ve given both the same tasks to test their capabilities and Siri fails a lot of the time. For example, I asked both chatbots to dig up some information from the internet and Siri just told me that information didn’t exist. In this context, “the information isn’t publicly available.” I repeated my question, rephrased it and got the same response every time.

Then I asked Gemini the exact same question and no problems. It understood the question, got the info from the internet without hesitation.

There’s something wrong with the new “smarter” Siri, I just don’t get it.

To my stereo pair of HomePod Minis (yes, I know I'm not supposed to pluralize the name, but whatever, Apple):

“Hey Siri, play blah blah playlist”

“NOW PLAYING BLAH BLAH FROM APPLE MUSIC” (Said at a volume that makes me uncomfortable, which is a much higher volume than she talked to me yesterday, for no good reason)

“Hey Siri, turn down my Siri response volume to 40%”

<SIRI PLAYS THE MUSIC AT FULL VOLUME>.

WTAF?!?!!

Aside from the fact that Siri took that response and turned my music UP, am I wrong for thinking that Siri should be able to change the response volume by me asking it? I swear I've done that. Apparently I can't any more.

And yes, I'm filing a bug report with Apple. But I really do believe we all need to keep this (VERY) noisy sub going. I saw a Google summary this AM of this sub that mentions the current (very bad) opinion of Siri in its different states; hopefully Apple is seeing this too. ugh.

And can’t even get the first one right

I’ve tried asking Siri three different times what the “Issue” with this order is (this is from the Wallet app where it sent me a notification that there is an issue with the order). I tried tapping the “Issue” on the screen but it doesn’t do anything. Siri just straight up won’t answer when I ask for more info.

Why isn't there a "Siri" option on Apple's feedback page?

I have some choice words I'd like to feed back to Apple (jk, I have some hopefully constructive criticism)