On a 18.2 ios ipad M1. Fooled around with it last night… kinda cool, although it did great with friends of mine but totally incapable of producing anything even vaguely resembling me. So today I dig into my archives and found a decent face shot of my sister. Launch the app. Click on the big plus to start another image generation… whoa, it says it needs to download stuff first. Didn’t need to do that last night. Of course that stayed up for too long a time. Tried quitting the app, didn’t solve the issue. Rebooted the ipad itself, launched it NOW it said something along the lines of feature not available. As I am writing this, the edit screen comes up. I guess the message that this stuff they have been heavily marketing is really half baked.
Remember the old medical saying “do no harm?” Seems it’s no longer in their DNA, take the “new” Siri. I’ve only asked it do do a few things, like what is the time, what is the temp, set a timer for me. Worked flawlessly. For years. NOW I ask for the temp and I get a “I can’t because I don’t know your location.” The next time I asked and got that response, I then asked for my location. Siri knew exactly where I lived, but right after spitting that out, she said she couldn’t tell me the temp because she didn’t know my location.
Maybe in time they will get things back to at least where they were before this marketing campaign. Just be warned and do not count on anything related to Apple Stu***ty to work correctly until it bakes far into the future. This whole experience is VERY disappointing to say the least.
I tried asking for the average temperature for today, ChatGPT asked for my location, and then I got the average of the hourly temperatures forecast for that day, so I then asked for the historical average temperature for this day at my location and I got just what I wanted!
One oddity: my son’s wife is called Terry, and when my wife says her name Siri wakes up (when I say it, Siri does not respond, so the voice training for ‘Hey Siri’ must have worked).
Well, Image Playground has decided to work correctly the past half dozen times I’ve tried it. Hopefully that will last. Still, it makes me look nothing even vaguely close to what I really look like, but oh well.
Also, the past 3-4 times I asked something from Siri, she was a bit more curt than she used to be, but at last got the few things I wanted done on the first shot. Maybe that was 18.2?
As for asking for her, I have noticed that sometimes it can be hard because when invoked a sound effect is played, it seems that can mask what you are trying to say. But still it flubs, I just asked for temperature and it greeted me asking what I wanted. As for invoking her, I did read that there was a way to use any phrase you may want. It was a multi-step process that I may at some future point try and do.
I’ve used a few Genmoji’s and they’re kinda useful. Not essential, mind you, but not useless. Only weird thing is it turns out those are only available on iPhone – Sequoia doesn’t have them yet! (If you do save one on your phone, it is available on Sequoia as a Sticker, so that’s one workaround.)
The weirdest thing I can’t figure out is about half the time when I click Summarize on a long web article, I get an error message that Summarize won’t work. But if I “select all” the text and choose “Summarize” from the Writing Tools contextual menu, it works!
