Comment by tuetuopay
7 days ago
Oh timers, you mean the one thing I use daily for cooking where they changed the recognized phrase between iOS 17 and iOS 18? It used to understand "notify me in 15 minutes" meant to set a timer. Now it asks for what I want to be reminded about to add it to the calendar. I have to explicitly say "set a 15-minute timer".
So long for muscle memory (oh and for consiseness, it's worse in French).
Anyways, that's the prime reason there's no list: either they want to change the commands willy-nilly, or they don't know them because that's whatever the model's learned.
This is why I call these voice "commands" spells. They feel very much like a spell. You have to remember them, and if you don't remember 'em exactly, they don't do what you expect. Siri (and Alexa for that matter) is a big failure. After 12 years of having a voice "assistant" in my pocket, I still don't use it for anything important and/or useful.
>I have to explicitly say "set a 15-minute timer".
Only saying "15 minutes" initiates a timer for that long.
OMG thanks, it also works in french!
This goes even deeper in the "undiscoverable commands" issue at hand.
"notify me in 15 minutes" feels natural and casual, and how I'd expect to interact with modern voice assistants. "set a 15 minutes timer" feels overly formal and redundant (it does not help that in French, a timer is "minuteur", so you repeat the "minutes" sound twice), and how I'd expect to interact with old voice assistants. This new one is just some hidden trial-and-error thing deep in Siri that's likely an engineer that likes cooking that added it as a shortcut.
>This new one is just some hidden trial-and-error thing deep in Siri that's likely an engineer that likes cooking that added it as a shortcut.
Among the many shortcomings of Siri is that it seems as if it's not good with verbs. I've learned to avoid them as much as possible. Put another way, it's better with nouns, so I focus on them. I guess that's why
"15-minute timer" and
"15 minutes"
work well. But similarly, I wanted to use the stopwatch the other day. Not something I ever really do. Just saying, "Stopwatch" got it open. And testing now on some non-Apple apps also worked (in case Siri has some built-in pro-Apple bias). One was WhatsApp. The other was an app for an insurance and banking company. That one, just saying its name opened the contact card I have for the company. That's fair. Trying again, and saying "company name app" opened the app.
Of course, sometimes the verbs are necessary. But I've had more success when I could avoid them. Do note that I say all this using a Siri-only phone that is too old for any of Apple Intelligence that may get mixed in with Siri.
It's not a huge deal, but on google devices, setting a timer is different from setting an alarm. the end result is more or less the same thing, but it uses different underlying functionality and I have to remember to say timer instead of alarm when I'm cooking.
Saying ”set an alarm in 15 minutes” vs ”set at timer for 15 minutes” to Siri also do different things
Really? For me both commands set a timer for 15 minutes.
Yep this gets me all the time. The biggest difference is that a timer will be displayed whereas an alarm is in the background. The display is very handy when cooking.
iOS also differentiates between a timer and an alarm.