Daring Fireball: Michael Tsai on Siri Reliability 

Michael Tsai:

Mostly what I have noticed is that Siri is a lot more reliable than it used to be. I had stopped using it because for years it would essentially throw away what I’d said. It was either unavailable (most of the time) or it didn’t understand me properly (less often). Now I regularly use it to make reminders while driving, and it pretty much always works.

John Gruber:

Same for me with speech-to-text translation (which isn’t part of Siri per se, but which Siri depends upon for input). I mostly gave up on it a few years ago, because too many times, I’d dictate something, the purple spinner would spin for a few seconds, and then nothing. I can’t remember the last time that happened to me now, though — and I find myself dictating texts all the time while walking through the city.

The key for me wasn’t just that Siri got smarter and better at speech-to-text, but that it does it live. Siri could be the best translator in the world, but if you have to talk into the void for 30 seconds and then wait another 30 seconds for the translation to come back, you don’t feel as comfortable using it, even if it’s right most of the time.

Watching Siri translate word-for-word as you speak give you the confidence to keep speaking and also makes it clear the moment she loses you. It completely changes the feature from “interesting tech demo” to “I’ll use this on a daily basis”.