Siri problems

(this belongs in several categories, but it’s all related. I wish there was a Siri topic).

I have several problems with Siri, sometimes combined with HomeKit or Shortcuts. I believe these are bugs in the system and it’s very frustrating at times trying to make these things work the way I want them to and the way they are supposed to work, I assume. it’s very unpredictable. Sometimes a Siri command works on one device, but not another one. Sometimes it works on one device at one time, but not later. and updates to the operating system often cause things to work differently. Let me mention the most important ones I’m struggling with at the moment.

I used to have the problem where my iPhone would hardly ever respond to “hey Siri” (except right after setting it up, and sometimes when I was screaming it into the microphone). I don’t have that problem anymore, I think since iOS 16, but now I kind of have the opposite problem where Siri is triggered by people talking, even if they are not close to saying the word Siri. For instance, this happens a lot when I’m listening to podcasts. Luckily nothing ever happens except this Siri UI coming up and dismissing itself after a few seconds. But it interrupts what I’m listening to, and it is annoying.

Sometimes Siri gets totally confused and thinks that I’m saying the non-existent word Bioing no matter what I actually said. I think this only happens if there’s a bit of background noise, but I have no idea where it gets that word from.

I’ve always had trouble getting “hey Siri“ to work using my AirPods Pro. After getting the second generation, it worked for a while, but recently it hasn’t. 

I can no longer use Siri to activate a HomeKit scene. This used to work fine, but no longer after I installed Ventura. If I say the name of a scene, Siri on the Mac asks me if I want to execute that scene in my home. I don’t want it to ask, but hopefully that only happens the first time. So I say yes or click on the yes button. But then Siri tells me something like “I’m sorry, but I cannot find anything like that in your home“. 

I have another problem, which I think only applies to my “Good morning“ scene. This is on my other devices. Again, it used to work fine. I don’t remember if the problem started in iOS 16 and watchOS 9 or if I had problems in the versions before that. But here I have experienced all of the inconsistencies I mentioned earlier. Previously, if I said “Good morning“ to my Apple Watch, it would activate that scene. Then it started greeting me back instead, telling me what the time was, but not doing anything. So I started experimenting and tried to be more explicit to see what would happen. I would say “start Good morning“, and Siri would say something like “sorry, but I’m afraid that is outside of my capabilities at the moment“. (After the latest update, I don’t get that error message anymore). So I tried to say “start the scene Good morning“, and then it would work, but it doesn’t anymore after the latest update. Now none of these work on my Apple Watch. It used to be after this problem started that one of these variations would work on At least one of my Apple watches some of the time and the same with my iPhone, but it would vary depending on the device, time and version of the OS. It has been a total mess.

I also have a couple of shortcuts called “Start meditation” and “End meditation” which I could activate using Siri by only saying their names. Then suddenly, after some update, those commands would open up the Workout application and start a workout meditation instead. Testing it out now it seems this has actually been fixed or reverted back to the way it was. So I hope it stays that way, but several times over the years I have been wondering how to name shortcuts and scenes to avoid problems like that. I guess there’s no way to make sure that iOS doesn’t hijack a name in the future to mean something else? Unless you are very creative with your names.

Apart from that, is there anything else I can do to work around these problems, or do I just have to wait and hope that they get fixed in a future update? (And that no new books are introduced).