Siri is so bad at everything

Based on 15 sampled comments from this thread. Analyzed 2026-10-19.

The thread is less about one embarrassing Siri failure than a pattern: an assistant that cannot be trusted with the tiny, repetitive jobs voice control exists to handle. Commenters describe the system contradicting itself on locked-phone calling, taking seconds to execute a bedtime lighting scene, and requiring users to discover whichever phrasing happens to work this week. Timers, music playback, navigation, Home controls, and Shortcuts all come up because these are not ambitious conversational tasks; they are the supposedly solved commands people rely on while driving, cooking, or otherwise hands-busy. The arrival of Apple Intelligence is viewed as making this worse in some cases. A formerly dependable dinner shortcut is displaced by an old message, and an AI-beta music request repeatedly confuses an artist with a loosely related song title while taking much longer to act. Several readers see this as a particularly stark failure for a company controlling the device, operating system, and assistant stack. Privacy is mocked as no excuse for an assistant that cannot complete basic actions. There is little defense of Siri itself. The narrower split is over whether voice assistants are inherently frivolous: critics call them needless friction removal, while others point to driving, food preparation, dirty hands, and disability as obvious cases where reliable hands-free AI is genuinely valuable. ChatGPT and Grok voice modes are praised for conversational quality, though their weak OS-level control leaves no clear winner.

The sharpest dispute is whether voice assistants solve a real problem or merely encourage needless phone use. Skeptics argue that speaking a command rarely beats touching a device and that convenience features erode self-control; defenders argue that driving, cooking, contamination-sensitive work, and accessibility make hands-free control indispensable, provided the assistant actually works reliably.

• Praise: Hands-free voice control remains a compelling AI use case in cars and kitchens, where touching a screen is unsafe, dirty, or simply impossible.
• Praise: ChatGPT’s newer voice experience is seen as dramatically more capable conversationally than legacy assistants, suggesting the underlying voice-AI bar has moved far beyond Siri.
• Praise: Siri can still occasionally complete routine smart-home and media commands, but commenters treat success as dependent on memorizing brittle wording rather than natural language.
• Concern: Siri cannot reliably repeat the same locked-phone calling request in a car, turning a safety-oriented hands-free feature into a multi-attempt distraction.
• Concern: Home-control language appears to drift from week to week, forcing users to reverse word order until the assistant finally accepts an identical intent.
• Concern: Apple Intelligence is accused of overriding explicit Shortcut invocations with stale message-derived guesses, a dangerous regression for personalized automation.
• Concern: Basic requests now carry conspicuous delays, from lighting scenes to reminders, making the assistant feel slower precisely where voice control should be instantaneous.
• Concern: Music, timers, navigation, and Watch commands fail on routine tasks, undermining confidence that Apple’s vertically integrated AI stack can handle its own first-party functions.