(cnet, WWDC)

Today I upgraded to macOS Sierra, and before having a look at anything else, I just started testing siri. There have been other different voice command interfaces available in the world before this, but I think it’s a shock that it’s taken until now, 2016 to get such an intuitive assistant-style voice command system as an included part of the operating system.

After about one minute of issuing basic voice commands for weather, events, figure conversions, opening programs, and so on, I was then testing whatever commands I could think of having to do with system automation. All of the user-control aspects of navigating the OS for example… “last window” or “next tab”. Both, surprisingly did not work. Thus it took me about 1 minute to be disappointed by this first introductory inclusion of siri in macOS.

(apple, macobserver.com)

So, if siri couldn’t do practically the first thing I thought of, “last window”, then how would we be expected to make that functionality work, presently? I created several simple applications using the AppleScript Editor utility, stuck them in the Applications directory, and gave them filenames for example like “position windows”, “tab one”, “tab two”, “tab three”, and “last application” which perform simple window navigating or executing of key commands in macOS.

If siri out-of-the-box knows how to “spotify.” or to “safari.”, then it should understand “position windows” (my new appleScript app to set the locations of my open windows)…. Right? Well, siri kind of did, but it had mixed results.

One minute the command “tab one” was working beautifully, switching to the first open tab in chrome, but then “tab two” would refuse to work. Simply re-naming the application “second tab” then issuing the voice command for “second tab” instead of “tab two” did inexplicably work, for example. Or one moment I was having siri successfully run “third tab” command, but a minute later, that command would be unknown while it would still successfully comply with the slightly less convenient, “launch third tab”.

(youtube: shawnfromportland)

The only guess I have as to why my custom applications would not be understood consistently is that this testing was taking place only minutes or hours after performing the upgrade of macOS, and siri was probably still in the process of indexing my system. It seemingly randomly would find one application, but be unable to find another application just like it right beside it. Not only that but it would yield different results for the same command issued, minute-to-minute.

I mean, if it were my judgement call to make, i’d say this is behavior that probably should not have made it past the QA for this release of siri, but I have faith apple will be swift to release incremental improvements. In one years time however, I would hope to siri get all of this right. I know i’m jumping the gun a little, but I’m disappointed to see the lack of machine learning as of yet in siri. I should be able to teach siri things about my own preferences, teach it new commands, and give it meaningful feedback on how good of a job it did at answering my request, in order to get it better next time.

Also, why is it that when looking for an official apple documentation page of every available siri command, I find the (cool) site https://hey-siri.io/ before I find any official page?

I predict that through the rest of 2016 and all through 2017 we are going to see rather frequent updates available to siri on the app store which will drastically expand siri’s abilities and level of integration quickly. It’s not hard to imagine the list of requested voice commands and requested siri integrations that are going to be flooding in from people to apple, for months, potentially years to come.

I think most people will be a bit disappointed with the finer details of siri at this introductory stage, but if we ‘stick it through’ the first year or so of trying to use this now-widely available new technology, we should naturally see improvements to the technology come back to us incrementally and rapidly.

In the [included above] video, I demonstrate the awkwardness of my approach with some of my applescripts, and show the inconsistent behavior of siri as well.

But you know what, it’s still cool and it’s going to get way better.