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Just watch the introduction of the Siri product: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agzItTz35QQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agzItTz35QQ "Your intelligent assi

Just watch the introduction of the Siri product: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agzItTz35QQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agzItTz35QQ "Your intelligent assistant that helps you get things done just by asking" I suspect Scott Forstall and Jobs wanted it to be what LLMs show the potential for it to be. Not the crappy barely functioning timer setting app it currently is. Siri is dumb as rocks, it's so bad at basic queries it's not worth trying to use.

shagie 4y ago
The tooling that it was designed for was things like https://youtu.be/agzItTz35QQ?t=709 https://youtu.be/agzItTz35QQ?t=709 Those were the intents that were set up. Yes, it would be nice to have LLM style power - but that isn't how Siri was architected even from the very start. Word combinations are recognized as certain intents and parsed for functions to call into apps that register that they are able to handle that function call. If there was no match for the intent, it was sent to Wolfram Alpha to do a knowledge base lookup. While Wolfram is really good, it certainly isn't a chat bot. Siri wasn't supposed to be smart. Siri was intended for an interface to the existing apps of phone, music, messages, calendar, reminders, map routes, email, and weather. When you look at that segment, 12:48 "just take your phone and ask Siri to set a timer for 30 minutes and you're done." Siri was very much intended as a timer setting app. What functionality in there that you see in this segment that isn't designed as an interface to existing apps? What time cue do you see them promising something smarter than what was designed?
- gonehome 4y ago
  They open with what they want it to be “intelligent assistant” and then show the capabilities it currently had. Since that time in 2011 it has gotten no closer to “intelligent assistant”. That’s a failure imo. Google’s is much better at answering basic queries.
  - shagie 4y ago
    Google's voice assistant is an interface to google cloud applications. Siri is an interface to a limited set of the apps on the iPhone. These are fundamentally different architectures for how how each was designed along with implications for privacy and where the company has compute resources that can be used. If you are after a general knowledge search engine, Google will certainly out preform Siri. Google has better cloud integration for a lot of their functionality. Apple doesn't have that amount of cloud resources that it can use and is a device first company rather than a cloud first company. If you want to say "android can search google better" Ok. I'll grant that. If that makes it "smarter" - ok. Android is smarter than Siri because it can search google better. If you want to say "android can control apps on its phone better" - I really want to see evidence that the ability for Android to control 3rd party music apps (e.g. Spotify) or report the weather or calendar or set up alarms... I don't believe that android is any better than Siri in that regard. If you want to chat with it (e.g. "what is the answer to life the universe and everything?") then those are cute responses that are programmed in. Do you have other criteria that you are using to compare the different devices other than its ability to search Google?
    - gonehome 4y ago
      You can adversarially frame "ability to intelligently answer questions" or act as an "intelligent assistant" to "ability to search google" but those are different things. I'm comparing the use case of the former as an end user. Siri will often uselessly "find results on the web and send them to my iPhone". Google can answer more queries directly as well as do basic timer setting stuff. The thing you're missing is the implementation detail is irrelevant to the end user, it's an issue of capability. Your point about Apple being worse at cloud is partly what I'm talking about (and one of the reasons siri is so much worse). It's why Apple has not done a good job with this up until now. I don't buy the "it's intentionally not capable/bad by design because that's what they were going for" argument. My prediction is Apple will make some sort of move here. Whether that's an investment in stable diffusion or something else I don't know. I expect what they do to have an apple flavor (on-device, privacy focused), but I think it will be leveraged to make Siri actually useful (and more of an actually intelligent and capable assistant).

shagie 4y ago

The tooling that it was designed for was things like https://youtu.be/agzItTz35QQ?t=709 https://youtu.be/agzItTz35QQ?t=709 Those were the intents that were set up. Yes, it would be nice to have LLM style power - but that isn't how Siri was architected even from the very start. Word combinations are recognized as certain intents and parsed for functions to call into apps that register that they are able to handle that function call. If there was no match for the intent, it was sent to Wolfram Alpha to do a knowledge base lookup. While Wolfram is really good, it certainly isn't a chat bot. Siri wasn't supposed to be smart. Siri was intended for an interface to the existing apps of phone, music, messages, calendar, reminders, map routes, email, and weather. When you look at that segment, 12:48 "just take your phone and ask Siri to set a timer for 30 minutes and you're done." Siri was very much intended as a timer setting app. What functionality in there that you see in this segment that isn't designed as an interface to existing apps? What time cue do you see them promising something smarter than what was designed?

gonehome 4y ago
They open with what they want it to be “intelligent assistant” and then show the capabilities it currently had. Since that time in 2011 it has gotten no closer to “intelligent assistant”. That’s a failure imo. Google’s is much better at answering basic queries.
- shagie 4y ago
  Google's voice assistant is an interface to google cloud applications. Siri is an interface to a limited set of the apps on the iPhone. These are fundamentally different architectures for how how each was designed along with implications for privacy and where the company has compute resources that can be used. If you are after a general knowledge search engine, Google will certainly out preform Siri. Google has better cloud integration for a lot of their functionality. Apple doesn't have that amount of cloud resources that it can use and is a device first company rather than a cloud first company. If you want to say "android can search google better" Ok. I'll grant that. If that makes it "smarter" - ok. Android is smarter than Siri because it can search google better. If you want to say "android can control apps on its phone better" - I really want to see evidence that the ability for Android to control 3rd party music apps (e.g. Spotify) or report the weather or calendar or set up alarms... I don't believe that android is any better than Siri in that regard. If you want to chat with it (e.g. "what is the answer to life the universe and everything?") then those are cute responses that are programmed in. Do you have other criteria that you are using to compare the different devices other than its ability to search Google?
  - gonehome 4y ago
    You can adversarially frame "ability to intelligently answer questions" or act as an "intelligent assistant" to "ability to search google" but those are different things. I'm comparing the use case of the former as an end user. Siri will often uselessly "find results on the web and send them to my iPhone". Google can answer more queries directly as well as do basic timer setting stuff. The thing you're missing is the implementation detail is irrelevant to the end user, it's an issue of capability. Your point about Apple being worse at cloud is partly what I'm talking about (and one of the reasons siri is so much worse). It's why Apple has not done a good job with this up until now. I don't buy the "it's intentionally not capable/bad by design because that's what they were going for" argument. My prediction is Apple will make some sort of move here. Whether that's an investment in stable diffusion or something else I don't know. I expect what they do to have an apple flavor (on-device, privacy focused), but I think it will be leveraged to make Siri actually useful (and more of an actually intelligent and capable assistant).