Category: iPhone

apple siri is very good, actually

whbeebe

I have grown to like Siri. Quite a lot, as a matter of fact. I’ve been using Siri far more with iOS 18 and my iPhone 16 Pro Max than I ever did with my iPhone 11 Pro Max and up to iOS 17. The differences between Siri on the iPhone 16 and iPhone 11 are stark. Questions I ask of, or commands I give to, Siri on the iPhone 16 are answered quickly and accurately. Siri on the iPhone 11 was slower and prone to messing up, such as the mispronunciation of names in my contacts, or else not understanding me and calling the wrong contact. Siri on the iPhone 11 was always slow. It would take many long seconds to respond, more than likely due to sending data to some remote server and waiting for the response. Siri on my iPhone 11 was not a pleasant experience, such that it wasn’t too long before I turned it off.

Siri’s performance on my iPhone 16 stands in stark contrast to Siri’s performance on my iPhone 11. For one thing, it’s for all practical purposes instantaneous with its responses. No lag, no wait. Maybe the network is better now, but I believe that the processor and memory are such that Siri’s processing is local to my iPhone 16. Furthermore, there are no more mispronunciations of any names. It’s also sophisticated enough that if I ask it to call ‘Bob’, and there are for example two ‘Bobs’ in my contacts, it will immediately ask me which one to call by speaking the first and last names of the entries. I can immediately tell it which one, and it then places the calls. I can ask Siri to answer an incoming call. I can use Siri to vocally sent text messages, or have it read text messages I receive while driving. I consider Siri a safety feature while driving because I don’t have to take my hands off the steering wheel nor my eyes off the road. I can never imagine doing this with Siri on my iPhone 11.

Many will read the prior paragraph and say how simplistic all that is. But simplistic is good, especially if it’s consistently accurate. I don’t want elaborate, I just need help in those mundane tasks that are of importance to me. This is true hands-free driving, and as I noted earlier, a true driving safety feature. I’m interested now more than ever to see how the verbal interface to Siri will allow me to interact with Siri. I’m positively excited at the prospects.

animal day journal #4

whbeebe

These past few weeks have been something of a downer for me. Since at least 8 January, I’ve been battling a upper respiratory virus that has pretty much knocked me for a loop; tired, week, nose running like an open faucet, coughs, chills, etc. I went to an after hours clinic ten minutes away from where I live, and they were able to determine I had neither COVID (again) nor strep. So they gave me a prescription for something to take care of the sinuses and the cough for about ten days, then when that was gone I started using Dayquil/Nyquil to handle things. Yesterday what was left in my sinuses finally broke up and came out, and I’ve been doing physical work without having to take a break every fifteen minutes.

To make things even worse it’s been very cold here in central Florida. How cold? Mid-50s Fahrenheit during the day down to mid-30s at night. This was all part of the cold wave that came rumbling out of Canada and into the mid-West. We got the edge of it all the way down here, and it was cold enough that snow fell with accumulations of 6 or more inches in the Florida Panhandle.

Needless to say all creatures great and small tried to keep warm while all this was happening. That’s what these two photos are about. Zoë was Velcroed to me for a number of days, while Beau kept stealing my seat every time I got up to go do something, like head to the bathroom. While last night went back down to 38°, today was a balmy 63°. While it was still in the mid-50°s yesterday, it was still warm enough, and I was in decent enough shape, to get some tasks of significance done.

Both of these photos were taken with my iPhone 16 Pro Max using the portrait setting. I did some post-processing with the Apple tools, primarily darkening the corners with the vignetting tool. The engineers spend untold sums of money to make sure corner-to-corner exposure is the same, and I go in and basically ignore that with my tweaks.

And yes, we still have our artificial Christmas tree up. Maybe I’ll have it down and stowed by Valentine’s Day.