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If it works equally good like Apple Siri or Google Hey (or whatever its's called), then it will be ... totally useless? I can't imagine that they bring a better product than two of the richest companies in the world even can't figure out (perfectly). And if I need to read and adjust all my code for typos, I can just write it myself.

Because in my experience it is very often like "Call Peter" -> "Today it's sunny in NY".




To be fair Siri was really good before iOS15 on the phone - very rarely got a word wrong then I don't know what they changed but it went belly up for me and many other people have said the same.

On macOS it still seems pretty good - I have carpal tunnel syndrome and by Thursday or Friday most weeks I end up using Siri to dictate not code but a lot of conversations in Slack, pull requests, iMessage, etc. In fact, I wrote this reply with Siri right now.


I don't know what version number, but when it was new I could depend on it to do things like sending SMS while driving, changing the navigation, etc.

Now it's barely worth attempting, because it gets it wrong more than it gets it right.


I definitely notice there's a difference in quality depending on your network latency I thought quite a bit of the processing was done locally now, but latency seems play such a part in its quality.


iPhone ability to convert speech to text has always been good. It’s always been Siri’s capacity to take a meaningful action from the recognized speech that has been problematic.


I've been trying to use Siri while driving more and more, it's amazing how distracting it is compared to peaking at the screen (it's naughty, I know, I try not to do it).

But yeah, something about talking to a device which gets things wrong all the time is ridiculously distracting, at least for me.

Sometimes I look back at the road after trying to workout what it interpreted and I feel scared how focused on the phone I became.


>I can't imagine that they bring a better product than two of the richest companies in the world

Code is much more constrained by language syntax though.

Even for the "call peter" example, while the input is easy, the expected range of inputs that Siri should handle and be able to differentiate it from is huge.

Of course this is still a problem for e.g. defining variable names, where you could say anything.


In my experience, OpenAI's Whisper speech recognition is beyond anything currently out there. Likely Github will use it on the backend.


> I can't imagine that they bring a better product than two of the richest companies in the world even can't figure out

Are either of those companies investing particularly heavily into voice agents? Certainly neither of them has anywhere near the kind of power of something like Copilot.

Also, a general agent is way different from one that's specific to writing code.


Somehow Google has gotten worse in the last couple of years.




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