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What are basic things to you?


Things that I remember failing off the top of my head:

"Set a timer to remind me every hour for the next five hours."

"Open Harry Potter on the Kindle app" (or more generally "do trivial X on Y app")

"Continue playback" (under many random circumstances)

And all the bizarre requests that it responds to with "you need the apple TV app"


Saying "call X" where X doesn't have an English name(and Siri is set to English) is just bound to fail. It's like the most basic functionality that all voice assistants fail at miserably - google assistant is equally garbage at it.


These assistants are really not working well in multi-lingual settings but I suspect that the stuff Apple was doing wouldn't improve it. Some functions are disabled if you have Siri in one language and your device in another.


But I mean, surely it's not that unusual to have English as the language set to everything, to live in an English speaking country, and yet either have a foreign name yourself or just be friends with someone who does. And it's not that Siri/Google Assistant don't recognize those names period - they would, had they been set to the language those names originate from. But if you're set to English then forget it. And yes, I understand this is a difficult problem to solve, but I had I not known anything about internal workings of technology and was just a regular customer, I would absolutely consider the ability to call someone "basic functionality".


Was not there an option to teach Siri? Or am I imagining things?




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