4 ms·
Kind of tangent, but it is often surprising what order the future arrives in. From the perspective of 1960, early "robots" were expected to be physically capab
by netcan 2y ago
Kind of tangent, but it is often surprising what order the future arrives in.
From the perspective of 1960, early "robots" were expected to be physically capable and mentally feeble. Good at logic. Capable of making a sandwich. Weak at empathy and whatnot.
Even from the perspective of 2025... most people don't understand how slowly robotics has advanced. Human-level performance at laundry folding remains a distant dream. Empathy is increasingly trivial.
So Siri.. and voice UIs generally. The bottlenecks have been in unexpected places.
In general, we just don't have very good UI paradigms for voice. Voice recognition is finally good. LLMs theoretically add a lot of capability. But... there just isn't a great UI.
It's like trying to use a smartphone with a nipple mouse instead of touch. You can slowly hack your way to making specific tasks/features work... but there is no radiation event where lots of tasks become possible.
- smcleod 2y agoSiri's voice recognition has gone down a lot over the last 5 years actually, it used to be far more accurate, its speech has certainly improved to be more natural sounding. Its capabilities though... yikes
- bombcar 2y agoSiri wasn’t great but it was way, way more usable before the “machine learning” update whenever that was. Before it was a verbal command line, but at least you could learn some commands. Now it’s a crapshoot.
- netcan 2y agoI think the problem is adding on to a clunky paradigm. It wasn't a good verbal command line. It was usable because even an imperfect command line UI is inherently usable if use cases are limited. Building on to that though... you always overreach. Personally, I always thought voice+screen interface was an under-explored. That (for example) would let you go from command line to command line navigator... a natural progression. Voice UI kind of needs to be "one shot" to be pleasant: Play "Fortunate Son." Once you have to go back and forth, listen to list of options... it's no fun anymore. The Windows/Mac/Xerox GUI paradigm required a mouse, keyboard & screen. Voice only is limiting... perhaps.
- nomel 2y agoThat crapshoot always seems to land on "Playing Apple Music".
- bombcar 2y agoSorry, "Cancel Timer" was not found in your music. Subscribe to Apple Music for more!
- kotaKat 2y agoThey spent more time polishing voices than they did on actual features, if anything, regressing them to the stone ages in terms of its primitive form. Plus, there’s no more humor. Trying to crack jokes at it used to give funny responses. Even old things like “I need to hide a body” — “I don’t know how to respond to that”. Insult it and it’s a “I won’t respond to that”. Lots of old funnies are now gone and stripped away.
- easton 2y agoI was mad that easter egg was gone, but I just tried "I need to hide a body" and Siri disabled location sharing on Find My. which is equally funny I think
- Lanolderen 2y agoAll of them feel to me like they went backwards. In the beginning you could say you killed someone and it'd show you the nearest park/forest to bury them in. Now you can't even get them to play X on Spotify half the time.
- AlexandrB 2y agoMoravec's Paradox strikes again. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
- netcan 2y agoWoah! You have no idea how much "hole" you just filled in my lexicon. Have been articulating this all wrong for years.
- ianbicking 2y agoThat's also a nice explanation of why brain size among mammals scales with body size without necessarily leading to higher-order intelligence.
- kumarvvr 2y agoI guess development is driven by military and commercial needs, rather than altruistic needs. The futuristic ads were made for the consumer to feel safe and sound. The actual money flowing went into military applications (drones, guidance systems, etc) and commercial applications (car factories) For the above systems, they don't have to be physically capable, just have a restricted set of actions / outcomes, for example, flying a missile. But, they need to be mentally strong, to take decisions at split seconds.
- Telemakhos 2y agoI was unaware of Apple’s military drone and missile programs. Could you point me to more information on those? I’m having trouble even imagining what an Apple drone would cost.
- troupo 2y agoThe thing is though, nothing progressed in Siri since the original demo in 2011. Despite boasting desktop-level CPUs and never-before-seen dedicated "neural engine" co-processors. It has only become worse in the past couple of years. The inability to know that bedroom means bedroom [1], or the impossible task of adding several items to a list [2], or failing to answer what the current month is [3] have nothing to do with slow progress or UI. [1] https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1781030511336456612 https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1781030511336456612 [2] https://mastodon.nu/@dmitriid/114172857097176113 https://mastodon.nu/@dmitriid/114172857097176113 and https://mastodon.nu/@dmitriid/114180042031267746 https://mastodon.nu/@dmitriid/114180042031267746 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43432945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43432945