Siri botches three natural time expressions for a 19:40 alarm while any LLM nails them
vanadiuz · reddit · 2026-09-28
A Reddit user tested Siri on iPhone (iOS 26.6.1, English UK) asking for a 19:40 alarm three ways. Speech recognition got every word right, but time parsing failed all three:
- "7 p.m. and 40 minutes" → set 19:00 (minutes dropped)
- "20 minutes before 8 p.m." → set 20:00 (offset dropped)
- "19 hours 40 minutes" → set 14:37 (a time nobody said)
Any current LLM resolves all three to 19:40 instantly, yet Siri never asks "did you mean 19:40?" — it confidently confirms the wrong answer. The author asks: is this a technical constraint (on-device latency, legacy rule-based intent parsers, fear of LLM hallucination in actions) or a product-priority problem? And for assistants that take real actions, should "confirm when uncertain" be a baseline requirement? Confidently executing a partial parse seems worse than asking.
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