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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • I maintain that prior to Siri, the Dragon-based iOS Voice Command feature (on iPhone 4) was accurate and functional for most purposes, and did on-device parsing. If I asked “Call Mums Mobile” or “Play Jonathan Coulton” it would parse my contacts for a contact named (or nicknamed) Mum and parse my music library for an artist who’s name matched “ˈdʒɑnəθən ˈkoʊltn̩”.

    For whatever reason, Siri records my voice, uploads it to the cloud and decides that I wanted to call “Moms homestyle kitchen” and play Drake.





  • They all do. Google search is one big primitive Digital Assistant. Apple’s Siri is less functional than its predecessor Voice Control. Amazon’s product recommendation algorithm and Alexa are also successful digital assistants.

    Meanwhile the YouTube algorithm, Netflix, and Metas recommendations are notoriously frustrating, pumping out irrelevant recommendations and obfuscating constant that you actually want to consume.

    Microsoft haven’t had any effective Digital Assistants to date and must they feel like they are being left behind. Their attempts to emulate successful product from other companies are either unnoticeably irrelevant or laughably bad. Even the terrible content recommendations of Netflix and YouTube keep people hooked.





  • ‘Data Detectors’ in MacOS are just as bad. Just like how sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, sometimes a string of numerals is just a string of numerals.

    It is not a phone number or a flight number or a ticket number, it is just a string of text that happen to all be numerals.

    I asked Apple Support how to disable data detectors in Preview (MacOS’s native PDF and image viewer) so I could highlight some part numbers without MacOS trying to make a FaceTime call and they told me to use Adobe Acrobat instead! The problem is that Acrobat is worse.