4 ms·

The key thing is that voice has low discoverability. Having a big announcement, “We’re replacing Siri with Iris” will make people who’d given up on Siri give it

by dhosek 3y ago

The key thing is that voice has low discoverability. Having a big announcement, “We’re replacing Siri with Iris” will make people who’d given up on Siri give it another try even if Iris is just a continued incremental advance that would have happened without the name change. The key thing is to not do this until you’ve got an incremental change that really is a broad improvement. Mostly I use Siri to do things like start workouts (currently semi-broken—it won’t correctly do anything other than a timed walk last I tried), timers and set alarms. Other than the workout issue, it mostly works, although I’ve found that Siri will tend to time out if I’m at the edge of my wifi network (like if I’m at the alley about to start a walk). There is also the challenge that there’s no convenient way to direct Siri to a particular device so I had to set my phone to only respond to “hey siri” while my watch will accept “siri” so I can force workout starting to be on the watch (if the phone gets it, Siri becomes confused and asks me what app to use). I’ve disabled voice wake up for Siri entirely on my MBP and iPad for this same reason. It’d be nice to specify different wake words for different devices (even better, custom wake words so I can address my phone as Renfield, but that’s just me). But without there being some compelling reason, I’m unlikely right now to expand beyond my basic Siri usage or even discover if they’ve finally fixed that d—n workout bug or not.

throwanem 3y ago
Eh. I feel like an OS upgrade offers enough scope for messaging that a name change may not add much, but I could see arguments either way. I also feel like "Apple makes a serious AI move", in 2024, is a big enough news story that messaging may not be that big a problem to begin with. No matter how it plays out, it is going to attract an enormous amount of attention, enough so that folks who aren't really tuned in to tech would still have a pretty good chance of hearing about it and trying it out. And on the third hand, if I were making product decisions here, I might not mind a relatively slow uptake. As I see it, Apple doesn't tend to early adopt because Apple differentiates partly on polish (this is why the Android fan critiques of Apple's slow adoption are so nonsense) - and it's hard to get polish right at the bleeding edge. AI Siri in 2024 feels a little daring. If it goes badly sideways, having fewer customers impacted would be better than more. (Siri isn't really hurting Apple in any way I can see, because nobody has a product in the space that doesn't suck. I could see them getting nervous about that changing, maybe. But I could also see them deciding it's still better to get it right than be first to market, which is why I'll believe the rumor only when it stops being one any more.)

by dhosek 3y ago

throwanem 3y ago

Eh. I feel like an OS upgrade offers enough scope for messaging that a name change may not add much, but I could see arguments either way. I also feel like "Apple makes a serious AI move", in 2024, is a big enough news story that messaging may not be that big a problem to begin with. No matter how it plays out, it is going to attract an enormous amount of attention, enough so that folks who aren't really tuned in to tech would still have a pretty good chance of hearing about it and trying it out. And on the third hand, if I were making product decisions here, I might not mind a relatively slow uptake. As I see it, Apple doesn't tend to early adopt because Apple differentiates partly on polish (this is why the Android fan critiques of Apple's slow adoption are so nonsense) - and it's hard to get polish right at the bleeding edge. AI Siri in 2024 feels a little daring. If it goes badly sideways, having fewer customers impacted would be better than more. (Siri isn't really hurting Apple in any way I can see, because nobody has a product in the space that doesn't suck. I could see them getting nervous about that changing, maybe. But I could also see them deciding it's still better to get it right than be first to market, which is why I'll believe the rumor only when it stops being one any more.)