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I wonder if this has anything to do with their acquisition of DarwinAI. After a decade of mediocrity, I'd love to see Siri get smarter. Any improvement would be

I wonder if this has anything to do with their acquisition of DarwinAI. After a decade of mediocrity, I'd love to see Siri get smarter. Any improvement would be welcome at this point.

sroussey 3y ago
I agree. The whole push to have Siri work on device was a noble one, but I’d rather have the option for a dumber on device Siri or a smarter in the cloud Siri.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
epaga 3y ago
Mediocrity is far too positive a word for the dumpster fire that is Siri.
- kstrauser 3y ago
  I hear that a lot, and I have no desire to tell you your opinion’s wrong, but it doesn’t match my experience. Siri’s… fine, I guess, for what I ask of it like setting timers and reminders and such. It’s not perfect, for sure: Me: Hey Siri, turn off the kitchen lights. Siri: I can’t process multiple requests. Me: Hey Siri, turn off the kitchen lights. Siri: OK. But it works reliably enough that I use it all the time for the reminder and timer actions. Is it vastly worse for other people, and in what ways?
- CharlesW 3y ago
  The characterization of "mediocre" is fair, but we're transiting a household to Siri from Alexa (because Alexa doesn't work locally, and because of Amazon's track record on privacy), and it's not noticeably worse.
  - georgespencer 3y ago
    Same transition some years ago. Siri is noticeably much, much worse to me. Borderline hopeless on a mixture of HomePod + HomePod Mini hardware.
  - MBCook 3y ago
    The feeling I’ve heard from people is Alexa was way better than Siri at first. Over time Siri got better. Not great but better. Alexa had mostly stayed the same or perhaps gotten a touch worse except for adding ads and other annoyances. I’ve never used anything but Siri. It works decently, definitely has its moods/dumb-as-a-post moments. But I’ve learn what works well and for that it’s proven very useful.
Aqua_Geek 3y ago
Honest question: what do you (in the general sense, not specifically asking the parent) use Siri for? I think my main (only?) use case is setting a timer. Maybe I find conversational UIs awkward, or maybe I just got jaded REALLY quickly from Siri’s lacking capabilities early on, but I have hardly used it in the decade or whatever that it’s been around.
- azinman2 3y ago
  I use it almost daily for something that is simple but under appreciated I don’t know why it’s not in every marketing video: “Siri, remind me tomorrow at 10am to do X” I outsource so much of my memory to the phone via Siri ALL THE TIME. It’s so useful. Even for things in 20m. I’ll easily forget if I don’t do this, and it’s reliable so it gives me confidence. It also keeps the notification present until I actually do the thing, so I have a kind of string around my finger until the task is accomplished. I can also snooze that notification as needed to rebring it up at the right time. Every time I do this around non-tech people they go “wow I didn’t know you could do that.” I swear it’s literally life changing, particularly for anyone over 30.
  - ribosometronome 3y ago
    Especially with Shortcuts, Siri can have some pretty useful functionality. My personal big improvement I'd like to see is being able to better able to tap into those actions without having to set things up in advance.
    - MBCook 3y ago
      I’m really hoping for something like that. A year or so ago I remember someone pointing out in a podcast how LLMs are great at taking something like general language and turning it into a series of predefined commands (the stuff available to shortcuts). It would instantly make Siri much more useful. I think Federico Viticci rigged up something similar or at least a powerful demo using Siri + Shortcuts + ChatGPT to be able to answer all sort of questions better than native Siri.
    - 3y ago
samatman 3y ago
Personally, I don't want Siri to be 'smarter', if smarter means it becomes an open-ended and unpredictable way to have an LLM guess what I meant. I'd like Siri to be more powerful, yes. I like that I can model Siri as a decision tree with voice-activated input. Being able to configure it to do more things (for example, to put reminders in Things rather than Reminders), that would be useful. More discoverability would also be great (but this is Apple we're talking about, so good luck there). But for me personally, the most important feature is that Siri is predictable: once I figure out how to do something with it, asking again in mostly the same way will get the same result. If I want to talk to an LLM, I have ChatGPT on my phone.

I wonder if this has anything to do with their acquisition of DarwinAI. After a decade of mediocrity, I'd love to see Siri get smarter. Any improvement would be welcome at this point.

sroussey 3y ago

I agree. The whole push to have Siri work on device was a noble one, but I’d rather have the option for a dumber on device Siri or a smarter in the cloud Siri.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

epaga 3y ago

Mediocrity is far too positive a word for the dumpster fire that is Siri.

kstrauser 3y ago
I hear that a lot, and I have no desire to tell you your opinion’s wrong, but it doesn’t match my experience. Siri’s… fine, I guess, for what I ask of it like setting timers and reminders and such. It’s not perfect, for sure: Me: Hey Siri, turn off the kitchen lights. Siri: I can’t process multiple requests. Me: Hey Siri, turn off the kitchen lights. Siri: OK. But it works reliably enough that I use it all the time for the reminder and timer actions. Is it vastly worse for other people, and in what ways?
CharlesW 3y ago
The characterization of "mediocre" is fair, but we're transiting a household to Siri from Alexa (because Alexa doesn't work locally, and because of Amazon's track record on privacy), and it's not noticeably worse.
- georgespencer 3y ago
  Same transition some years ago. Siri is noticeably much, much worse to me. Borderline hopeless on a mixture of HomePod + HomePod Mini hardware.
- MBCook 3y ago
  The feeling I’ve heard from people is Alexa was way better than Siri at first. Over time Siri got better. Not great but better. Alexa had mostly stayed the same or perhaps gotten a touch worse except for adding ads and other annoyances. I’ve never used anything but Siri. It works decently, definitely has its moods/dumb-as-a-post moments. But I’ve learn what works well and for that it’s proven very useful.

Aqua_Geek 3y ago

Honest question: what do you (in the general sense, not specifically asking the parent) use Siri for? I think my main (only?) use case is setting a timer. Maybe I find conversational UIs awkward, or maybe I just got jaded REALLY quickly from Siri’s lacking capabilities early on, but I have hardly used it in the decade or whatever that it’s been around.

azinman2 3y ago
I use it almost daily for something that is simple but under appreciated I don’t know why it’s not in every marketing video: “Siri, remind me tomorrow at 10am to do X” I outsource so much of my memory to the phone via Siri ALL THE TIME. It’s so useful. Even for things in 20m. I’ll easily forget if I don’t do this, and it’s reliable so it gives me confidence. It also keeps the notification present until I actually do the thing, so I have a kind of string around my finger until the task is accomplished. I can also snooze that notification as needed to rebring it up at the right time. Every time I do this around non-tech people they go “wow I didn’t know you could do that.” I swear it’s literally life changing, particularly for anyone over 30.
- ribosometronome 3y ago
  Especially with Shortcuts, Siri can have some pretty useful functionality. My personal big improvement I'd like to see is being able to better able to tap into those actions without having to set things up in advance.
  - MBCook 3y ago
    I’m really hoping for something like that. A year or so ago I remember someone pointing out in a podcast how LLMs are great at taking something like general language and turning it into a series of predefined commands (the stuff available to shortcuts). It would instantly make Siri much more useful. I think Federico Viticci rigged up something similar or at least a powerful demo using Siri + Shortcuts + ChatGPT to be able to answer all sort of questions better than native Siri.
  - 3y ago

samatman 3y ago

Personally, I don't want Siri to be 'smarter', if smarter means it becomes an open-ended and unpredictable way to have an LLM guess what I meant. I'd like Siri to be more powerful, yes. I like that I can model Siri as a decision tree with voice-activated input. Being able to configure it to do more things (for example, to put reminders in Things rather than Reminders), that would be useful. More discoverability would also be great (but this is Apple we're talking about, so good luck there). But for me personally, the most important feature is that Siri is predictable: once I figure out how to do something with it, asking again in mostly the same way will get the same result. If I want to talk to an LLM, I have ChatGPT on my phone.