I get that but the ones in London are only really used by people who have money to burn.

Ah yeah I guess if you don’t have decent public transport that would deffo be an issue.

Serious: As a Brit, I’ve never quite understood the American fascination with valet parking. It does seem like a great way to get your car stolen or trashed. Why not just park your car yourself? I also thought the keys being stored outside in a box was a movie trope. I guess not? In which case how are valet-parked cars ever NOT stolen? You know the owner is inside for the duration. You know where the cars are parked and you can just walk up and take the keys. This seems hilariously silly.

Most of the people I know in the U.K. turned it off years ago. They can’t be bothered with the hassle of it. For dictation it needs to be 100% especially for dictation while driving. When it can’t even get a five word sentence right, you give up after a while. I’m sure it works great for some people but I’ve yet to meet one of those people. Example: even if I said the simplest thing - hey siri next track - it would either say “something went wrong” or “here’s what I found on the web for wet sack”. I found it to be a novelty more than anything else. Couldn’t tell me F1 race positions. Couldn’t tell me the weather. Couldn’t find stuff in my calendar. Didn’t understand request to navigate.

I have a reasonably bland U.K. accent. I’ve tried Siri in English, American and Australian. Australian had about 10% success rate. The rest were less functional. Most of the time it just stops listening. So if I dictate a message to someone like “tell Mike I’ve left the house and will grab some food on the way” it gets as far as “I’ve left the house and” and then just sends the message. The lack of context really irritated me though. I couldn’t say “what’s next in my calendar?” And when it replied, then ask “and what’s the location?” It treats both as two separate queries. Although mostly it would reply “here’s what I found on the web for water rotation”.

To be fair, Siri never understood a single thing I said to it anyway. It barely had a 5% success rate which is one of the other reasons I turned it off. Utterly pointless. It had no concept of context so between that and getting 95% of things wrong, it took longer to constantly check everything it was doing than to just do it the old school way.

Nope. They worked with piezo electric transducers. Not microphones. Entirely different tech.

They worked with piezo electric transducers. Not microphones. Entirely different tech.

In order to listen for the key phrases (hey siri, etc), they’re listening to everything. Mic is on all the time. And if you have an Apple Watch, doubly so. That’s how they can detect the sound of hands being washed.

I don’t think anyone is naïve enough to think voice assistants aren’t listening to everything you say are they? That’s why you turn them off. And you sure as hell don’t have “smart” speakers in your house unless you don’t care about privacy.

Wow. If those things had ever come to England they’d have been used as mobile toilets on Friday nights when the pubs let out. They wouldn’t survive a single day 😂😂🤣🤣