[tvararu]

I used to be able to tell Siri "Turn off the lights."

Sometimes in 2017 or 2018 they "updated" it and now it replies "Which room?" Followed by slowly listing out the 6 or 7 options including "everywhere."

I haven't been able to reprogram myself to say "Turn off all the lights" which works as before. Hearing that reply is the equivalent of hitting your toe on a wardrobe.

This update didn't fix this. The functionality is the same as before.

Basic stuff, but no way to fix it.

[mrguyorama]

This is a fundamental result of any natural language system. English is explicitly ambiguous, and explicitly a 1 dimensional medium.

Meanwhile using a screen, you can surface numerous easily discoverable options that a human being can quickly consume and choose, and the structure of the options can convey its own information, and you have lots of other signal channels like color.

I feel like people who insist that voice controlled computing is the future have never REALLY tried to voice control their computer with a voice, which has been eminently possible since at least Windows XP, and indeed is a way that disabled users have been interacting with computers for decades.

[layer8]

Similarly, stopping an alarm in another room/on another device doesn’t seem possible without Siri having to ask back about the device/room, and the user having to affirm it. That back and forth takes an unnerving couple of seconds. You can’t just say “Stop the alarm in $room/on $device”. It gets worse when the device you talk to is simultaneously playing back something, because then you first have to stop that playback in order for Siri to not misapply the “stop” command intended for the alarm.

[brink]

I'm in the same boat. My phone keeps asking me if I want to update to Gemini, but I won't because Gemini just gives my typical LLM BS responses when I just want to do a basic Google search with my voice. Gemini just complicates my already complicated life, so I don't want it.