Apple keeps ‘fixing’ what isn’t wrong with Siri

Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized roundup. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to give it a read during lunch or dinner hours too.

Siri season

Ironically for a technology that interprets human voices, Siri is evidence that Apple isn’t very good at listening. Countless users (and at least one trusted expert) have complained about the frequency with which Siri gets things wrong, but the company refuses to acknowledge the problem and shows little inclination to make it smarter. We’ve tried nothing, tearful department heads presumably report to Tim Cook, and we’re all out of ideas.

Actually, that isn’t quite fair. Apple has lots of ideas for ways to make Siri better; they’re just the wrong ideas. Shortening the trigger phrase, for example, fixes something that wasn’t broken and makes something that was bad–false positives where Siri muscles into conversations where it isn’t wanted–even worse. Nobody was going around complaining about that burdensome third syllable. The trigger phrase wasn’t the problem.

What about the microphones, then? Maybe they’re the problem. Last week fellow trusted expert Ming-Chi Kuo reported that next year’s iPhone 16 will have better microphones in order to deliver superior Siri performance. But again–and I hope this won’t sound ungrateful–audio fidelity wasn’t the problem. Sure, Siri’s gaffes can occasionally be traced to mishearings, and nine months from now, and on the new iPhones only, that will happen less. But far more of the mistakes occur when Siri correctly hears the owner’s words and then extrapolates those words into some ludicrous fantasyland interpretation. Focusing on the microphones is like going into a Parisian restaurant and speaking English loudly instead of doing the hard work of learning French.

What needs to happen isn’t exciting, and doesn’t make appealing headlines because it can’t be quantified in hardware spec upgrades. But it’s important. Apple needs to put its software teams on an urgent mission to make Siri smarter at interpreting commands, less prone to guess when it doesn’t have good evidence of what is needed, and less intrusive unless it can be sure it’s wanted. This is hard work–and the worst part is that Apple can’t even take credit for the improvements at a launch event without admitting that Siri is less-than-great. As far as Apple is concerned this is all pain and no gain, and part of me can sort of understand why it’s so reluctant to knuckle down.

But Apple is supposed to be all about the user experience, and big announcement or not, people will notice if Siri 2.0 suddenly stops getting things wrong. This is a technology that’s built into almost all of Apple’s consumer products, and fixing it would have huge benefits for everyone. I’m just not convinced that Apple realizes it needs fixing, and that’s the most worrying thing of all.

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Podcast of the week

On this episode of the Macworld Podcast, it’s all about your hot takes! You have thoughts on a couple of hot-button topics! Let’s hear what you have to say!

You can catch every episode of the Macworld Podcast on Spotify, Soundcloud, the Podcasts app, or our own site.

The rumor mill

The dream of an all-screen iPhone is closer than ever. (But it’s still very far away.)

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Software updates, bugs, and problems

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tvOS 17.2 changes your Siri Remote’s side button for the better.

And with that, we’re done for this week’s Apple Breakfast. If you’d like to get regular roundups, sign up for our newsletters. You can also follow us on Facebook, Threads, or Twitter for discussion of breaking Apple news stories. See you next Monday, and stay Appley.

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