alt Hacker NewsA few years ago, the ability to do anything other than a timed walk on my watch with Siri broke. I used to be able to do things like say, “start a 3 mile walk” or “start a 200 calorie walk” and then the latter stopped working and then the former stopped letting me do non-integer numbers of miles and then nothing at all and now I cannot do anything other than start an unmeasured walk or a timed walk with siri and I’m still pissed about that. I don’t want to have conversations with my watch or my phone, I want it to handle simple basic tasks reliably.
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Google did the same bullshit on Android.
With Google Assistant (old assistant) I could say "Hey Google, play daft punk" and it would start playing Daft Punk on Spotify.
With Gemini (new assistant) it says "sorry I cannot play music, but here are links to services where you can find Daft Punk albums".
Fortunately at the moment you can still toggle between them. I guess not for long though.
“Shuffle playlist _____” broke a few years ago too. Now it consistently takes that to mean “Play other music similar to the playlist.”
If I specify “Shuffle playlist _____ in Apple Music” somehow that works right, even though it’s still using Apple Music in the first example when it plays the wrong music.
We’ll see if they managed to unfuck it with the new Siri update, or knowing LLMs perhaps they’ll make it non-deterministic so sometimes it works and sometimes it plays music you didn’t ask for.