SIRI AI, A New Beginning

[twerppoet54]

We all know that Siri is useless, except for a few things. Well, it was. It looks like with iOS/iPadOS27 it is going to be a bit less useless. We are going to have to retrain ourselves, to find those things that we actually find usefull.

So, I thought we could have a thread to discuss our successes and failures as we discover Siri AI's capabilities.

I've had a long standing issue with creating Calendar events for the fifth Saturday of the month. These happen about once a quarter, and are difficult to enter as re-occurring events, and I'd rather not have to browse the calendar and enter them all individually. Can Siri AI do this for me? Yes, it could.

BTW, screenshots in the Siri app gives you the same full page option you get when browsing in Safair. Nice!

 

[twerppoet54]

And then failure. I did something similar, asking for the Thursday before the first Tuesday of the month. It found all the dates, but only created the first two events (even though it said it created all of them). It also failed to create an alert for the events.

I sent a report to Apple. Easy to do in the Beta. Hopefully it's a bug that will be fixed.

 

[jkingrph1]

I tried Siri back on my iphone 5, and never used it since.

 

[Pinkpoison]

I've lost patience with Siri, it never understands what I say and typing isn't much better, I just don't bother with it now...

 

[twerppoet54]

I suggest you try it again when you upgrade to iOS/iPadOS 27. While still not perfect, it is amazingly better.

Last week I asked it when the ARRL SET (Simulated Emergency Test) is scheduled. It found the answer in an email newsletter i barely read a month ago.

Yesterday I pointed the phone camera at my ICOM7300MK2 radio screen and asked what kind of signal I was seeing. It did not get the answer, but it did give a decent description of what band I was on and what digital signals were common there.

I used to occasionally ask it when the next solstice/equinox would be. It always gave me the current date. Now it just works.

On the down side you used to be able to ask it "Why did the chicken cross the road?" and get some pretty funny answers. Well funny to me. Now it just gives you an analysis of the joke.

Edit. Just tried the last test again, and got the standard answer, then tried again and got this.

The classic punchline to the riddle is to get to the other side. It is an example of anti-humor, where the setup leads the listener to expect a clever punchline but is instead given a simple statement of fact.

By the way, I'm an assistant powered by AI and may make mistakes. Always verify important details.

Here is my current list of asked question in the Siri app. While they are no always as complete as I'd like, they are genuinely useful and include links to the sources so I can dig deeper on my own. Or sometimes asking followup questitons.

The ARES SET plan started with the first question I mentioned and ended up with a plan outline close enough that I can use it as a starting place. I'm keeping the session to see if how close I can get it to complete without having type it all out manually.

So, I'm pleased with the improvements, and interested to see how far it goes.

 

[Pinkpoison]

I added an important birthday, asked Siri to remind me, it acknowledged it and then...I got nothing....

 

[twerppoet54]

I added an important birthday, asked Siri to remind me, it acknowledged it and then...I got nothing....

Are you on the iOS27 beta?

If so, can you tell me the steps. I'd like to duplicate it, and submit the result to Apple.

 

[twerppoet54]

On the other hand, Siri AI's air quality reports are not to be trusted. According to Siri itself, it uses regional reports from several sources and averages them. This is resulting in significantly lower/safer reported levels than what Apple's Weather app reports.

 

[twerppoet54]

After hours working on a shortcut, I finally got it to pull a huge list of names, addresses, and other info off a site and add them to a note. A huge list that was formatted something like:

Status: Active
Call Sign: AA11BB
Name: Bubba Gump
Address: Over there

Usable, but not easy to work with. So, I told Siri AI to "reformat the selected text as a CSV file". It did. I copied the text to a Numbers spreadsheet and all was happiness. This would have been a major chore, but was done in minutes.

Oh, it isn't perfect, but it will do what I need, and I can move on the the next chore.

 

[twerppoet54]

Tonight I asked Siri AI to gather all the info I had about the club for a brochure. I also asked it to give me an outline about Meshcore (low power radio coms). I'm not asking it to write or create these, just give me a starting place, and that is often the hardest part for me.