6 ms·

At this point, just about anything Apple can do will be way way way better than the absolute turd that is Siri. (It was only impressive 15 years ago). Apple's

• Rebuff5007 1y ago
  I know this is the leading narrative, but I actually disagree. Apple has a wonderful set of products without any form of generative AI, and those products continues to exist. Yes there is opportunity to add some fancy natural-language based search / control, but that seems like relatively low hanging fruit compared to the moat they have and defend. Will adding gen ai natively to apple products have people non-trivially change the way they use iphones or macs? Probably not. So there is literally no rush here.
  • halJordan 1y ago
    Obviously reasonable minds may disagree. And i do i disagree with your disagree-al. Your reasonable response necessarily stems from a foundation that llms are just stochastic parrots incapable of non-trivially changing someone's usage. That isn't true, and has been shown to be untrue in many domains at this point. And that's only from the chatbot form of llms. Tool usage and agents will reveal more new paradigms
  • thejazzman 1y ago
    > Siri, open the east door < do you want to open - the east door - the west door - all the doors > Siri, open the east door < opening the east door They kinda really super suck. Siri used to work better than it does today. It's often a bigger chore than opening the app and tapping the button. These quirks hit me on a daily basis when all I want to do is control my lights and locks
    • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      Turn off Apple Intelligence. I got sick of Siri asking, when I asked for the garage door to be opened, if I meant my house in Wyoming or 6th-story apartment in New York (which doesn't have a garage).
      • ben_w 1y ago
        I think Apple Intelligence is not available on either of my two phones or my one iPad, but still 1/3rd of the time when I say "Siri, stop", the Home Pod in a different room says "Stop the alarm on Ben's iPhone 2022?", while the actual device 2m away that I don't want to touch (because I'm cooking) carries on ringing its alarm or timer. Or, even weirder, when the phone itself does stop and the Home Pod says that and then follows up with "Hello?" because I didn't answer because the phone alarm stopped.
  • atonse 1y ago
    It's not about being fancy. My examples are so utterly dull. Being able to say "turn on the lights in the living room and turn off the fans in the kids' rooms" – is not a crazy use case. Instead, I literally have to say: - Turn on Living Room light - wait - turn off <son's name> bedroom fan - wait - turn off <daughter's name> bedroom fan Yes, I could actually say "turn off all the fans" (I believe Siri understands that) but that's usually not what I want. Another example, you have 3-4 timers going: Let's say I'm cooking and have an oven timer, but also have a timer for my kids to stop their device time. I may have a few going. But being able to say "cancel all the timers except the longest one" is TRIVIAL for a first year programmer to implement. But instead, it's a slog with Siri.
    • rcarmo 1y ago
      Actually, what you describe should be feasible with the new on-device foundation models (I haven’t installed the beta myself, but in my close friend group we’ve been suggesting prompts to the couple of brave people who do Switft development, and the foundation models seem able to do that).
      • atonse 1y ago
        That's wonderful news. I hope it translates to being baked into the built-in apps like Home/Siri.
    • wrboyce 1y ago
      You could make this slightly easier on your sanity by adding your kids’ rooms to a zone, fyi.
      • atonse 1y ago
        I'll try that, thanks. (Probably a zone like "upstairs" to turn off stuff upstairs when we're downstairs all day)
  • dzhiurgis 1y ago
    If OpenAI released a phone Apple’s sales will be down 50%. At this point only a handful of apps that are irreplaceable are propping iOS up and that won’t last.
    • rkomorn 1y ago
      What data backs this take of yours? What irreplaceable apps are propping up iOS? What's the data showing that 50% of iPhone users are basically just begging to get off the platform?
      • dzhiurgis 1y ago
        > What irreplaceable apps are propping up iOS? EV charging and smart ID (aka gov id). To lesser extent - anything thats a smart hardware - home automation, cameras, vacuums, cars, drones, etc. Then there’s services - namely ride hailing, escooter hire. Plenty of mobile webapps are pretty crippled too so you download apps.
        • msgodel 1y ago
          Don't know about EV stuff but I don't think normal ID cards are going anywhere. All the home automation stuff I've gotten speaks UPNP, my quadcopter doesn't have an app at all AFAIK but I shopped for an open source one. All the services seem to be moving toward the web just because dealing with the review processes is annoying and all you get from it is push notifications.
        • rkomorn 1y ago
          I don't understand how you consider these iOS-specific? These apps are also all available on Android phones. If people, today, don't want to have iOS devices, they can switch to Android devices and use virtually all the same apps. What would OpenAI release that would affect Apple and not every other phone vendor? Or do you also think all Android sales would tank if OpenAI released a phone?
          • dzhiurgis 1y ago
  • msgodel 1y ago
    This approach would be fine if users were empowered to add AI integration they wanted on their own. They are not though. Absolute control over the platform means Apple has the responsibility to have more vision for the future than anyone else. They do not and will fail to satisfy their users. It will result in either a dramatic change of leadership and strategy and or drive the customers elsewhere.
  • deleted 1y ago
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  • quitit 1y ago
    There is a consequence to shifting to LLMs. Despite Siri's reputation, it is a well used product(1), and despite HN's constant noise, Siri actually works very well for the purposes of controlling other apple devices in ways that I've noticed to be far better than Alexa (the other digital assistant that I regularly use). Switching that to an LLM-based represents a massive increase in computational requirements without pushing the needle for most requests. While fancy, users don't want to sit and have a verbose ChatGPT style conversation with Siri, they just want the command run and done. So this means any advertised change to Siri will need to be sufficiently large such that Siri could seemingly decode any request with minimal or no follow-up questioning, anything short of this will be largely derided, and face the same backlash as current-era Siri. At the moment siri answers many trivial requests without the use of an LLM. Yes you can speak to siri with relative terms or needs based requests, e.g. saying "It's dark in here" will result in siri turning on the lights in just the room where the request was made(2), even if other receivers in the house heard the request. It's also smart enough to recognise that if you label a room as something like the "office" but later made a request for the "study", it will prompt if actually meant the "office". The big caveat here is that Siri's abilities change based on the language selected, non-english languages appear to have less flexibility in the type of request and the syntax used. Another factor is that requests during certain peak periods appear to be handled differently, as if there are fall-back levels of AI smarts at the server level. To get around that new Siri will need to be largely offline, which appears consistent with Apple's new AI strategy of local models for basic tasks and complex requests being sent to private cloud compute. Like Apple Maps, I anticipate the pile-on to Siri will go on far longer than deserved, but what does seem certain is that change is coming. (1) Apple have stated that Siri is the most used digital assistant. However I have not found any supporting data for this claim other than Apple's own keynote address where the claim was made. (2) Requires that rooms are set up in homekit and there are per-room based receivers, such as a homepod in each room.
    • oc1 1y ago
      >> While fancy, users don't want to sit and have a verbose ChatGPT style conversation with Siri, they just want the command run and done. You're absolutely right! Unfortunately Siri is too dumb for even those most basic tasks. Their ML approach failed and they can't admit it.
• jurgenaut23 1y ago
  It doesn’t matter. No one buys an iPhone for Siri and no one switches to Android for whatever they call this thing. I have owned an iPhone for more than 15 years, and I have used Siri a dozen times. They will implement something using GPT-4 or Claude and this whole mess will be forgotten.
  • fasthands9 1y ago
    I do think Apple needs a better Siri, but I think ultimately they were smart not to plow tons of money into it trying to do it themselves. A better Siri is an expense to keep up the premium brand, not something that they will monetize. For particular uses of AI people will just want particular apps.
  • sandspar 1y ago
    Young people are increasingly comfortable using voice, and marketing agencies already consider Gen Alpha to be “voice native.” I once saw a small child help his grandfather with a phone issue. The grandfather fumbled with the GUI, but the child opened Siri and solved it by voice. If Apple drops the ball on voice, it may not hurt them today - but they risk losing the next decade.
    • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > Young people are increasingly comfortable using voice I know plenty of folks in their 40s and 50s who have used Siri as their primary way to search the internet for years.
      • dham 1y ago
        My mom does everything through voice on her iPhone. My son defaults to using Siri on Mac for a ton of things. He grew up with an Alexa. It's really the in between generation who learned how to master a computer at a young age that don't really use it.
    • jaredwiener 1y ago
      My in-laws use Siri/voice interactions almost exclusively, dictating text messages out-loud, searching for shows on Roku using the voice remote, etc. Even my 2.5 year old will ask Alexa and Siri to do things, sometimes far away from any device that could respond.
• amluto 1y ago
  I would argue that the problem with Siri isn’t the model. Siri is perfectly fine at transcribing speech, although it seems to struggle with figuring out when an instruction ends. But Siri is awful at doing anything with even simple instructions: - It regularly displays an accurate transcription with exactly the same text that usually works and then sits there, apparently indefinitely, doing nothing. - Sometimes it’s very slow to react. This seems to be separate from the above “takes literally forever” issue. - Siri is apparently incapable of doing a lot of things that ought to work. For example, for years, trying to use Siri on a watch to place a call on Bluetooth (while the phone is right there) would have nonsensical effects. These won’t be fixed with a better model. They will be fixed with a better architecture. OpenAI and Anthopic can’t provide that except insofar as they might inspire Apple to wire useful functionality up to something like MCP to allow the model to do useful things. > Even my son suggested things like "I wish your phone had ChatGPT and you could ask it to organize all your apps into folders" – we can all come up with really basic things they could've done so easily, with privacy built in. I’m not convinced the industry knows how to expose uncontrolled data like one’s folders to an LLM without gaping exploit opportunities. Apple won’t exploit you deliberately, as that’s not their MO, but they are not immune to letting things resembling instructions that are in one of your folders exploit you.