[HN Gopher] Even Apple employees hate Siri and are skeptical of ...
___________________________________________________________________
Even Apple employees hate Siri and are skeptical of its future, new
report says
Author : carlycue
Score : 215 points
Date : 2023-04-27 16:01 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (9to5mac.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (9to5mac.com)
| cmdrk wrote:
| I rarely use Siri, but my technophobe elderly parents have
| embraced it as a fairly intuitive way to navigate their phone
| settings, contacts list, etc.
| cubefox wrote:
| Here is the original article:
|
| https://www.theinformation.com/articles/apples-siri-chief-st...
| sarks_nz wrote:
| I love Siri with Apple Maps in New Zealand /s
|
| Me: "Siri, give me directions to vaguely ethnic sounding cafe"
| where cafe is about 2km away.
|
| Siri: "Getting directions to other cafe in
| London/Europe/Tajikistan".
|
| So theres no line of code that says "If found location if
| >2000kms away with no direct land route and/or crosses multiple
| continents, it might not be the right one"
|
| Google Maps and voice works pretty flawlessly.
| adityathakurxd wrote:
| Siri is nice. Use it for a variety of things. Although would hurt
| if it is not worked on and improved.
| PaulStatezny wrote:
| I don't use Siri all day, every day. It's certainly not perfect.
| But did you know you can say things like...
|
| "Turn off the Apple TV."
|
| "Turn off low power mode."
|
| "Stop navigating."
|
| "Open [name of app I don't want to spend time finding in my iOS
| folders]"
|
| "What song is this?" (Listens and usually is able to discover the
| name/artist of the song in the background.)
|
| So when people say things like, "Siri is mostly useless," I think
| - wow, that is a very hyperbolic statement.
| mthoms wrote:
| It's useless beyond manipulating iDevices, navigation tasks and
| simple questions. Even then, if you don't ask in the exact
| right way it often doesn't work.
| lolinder wrote:
| Is this any different than Alexa or Google, though? I guess
| Google is probably better at looking up facts and Alexa at
| ordering stuff (if buying things without even seeing a
| picture is your thing), but neither is _that_ useful. Is this
| not just a case of voice interfaces being much harder to do
| right than people originally hoped?
|
| (I say this as someone who has a Google Home that I use
| regularly, but mostly as a kitchen timer and music player.)
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| I mentioned an example in another comment - basic
| manipulation of timers don't work well - like, adding time
| to an existing timer. When I'm working in the kitchen this
| is really useful. There are also major performance issues -
| "working on it" and "sorry can you say that again" are
| probably two of it's most common utterances. Random bus
| like "there's nothing playing" and the wrong siri taking
| over the request from a million miles away and you just
| can't even hear is extra annoying.
| toast0 wrote:
| Google Home is pretty bad at adding time to existing
| timers too. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it creates
| a second timer with a difficult to access name.
|
| Personally, I'm become convinced a _good_ talking
| /listening clock is actually a useful thing, but Google
| isn't providing it, and it sounds like Apple isn't
| either.
| isk517 wrote:
| At this point it will be a race see which virtual assistant
| can become universally useful first, and from what the
| article is implying Siri is not anywhere close to where
| they need it to be.
| PaulBGD_ wrote:
| My favorite is on the Apple TV, "search for [some video] on
| youtube" will actually open the app and search for it.
|
| I think the big issue is that a lot of these aren't
| discoverable, and because Siri isn't very smart at natural
| language you won't discover them by asking for something
| similar like you could with Google Assistant. An LLM for
| parsing requests could be super interesting here.
| brianpan wrote:
| "Fast-forward 2 minutes" to skip commercials made watching on
| the Apple TV way better than watching on my laptop,
| especially for sports.
| shagie wrote:
| Siri mostly runs on device. Having a LLM needs a much more
| powerful device or Apple would need to drastically scale up
| its cloud buys from AWS, GCP, and Azure (which would in turn
| make the service more expensive).
| agentdrtran wrote:
| Siri's functionality is fine for me, it just seems to really
| struggle to understand me compared to Google
| nneonneo wrote:
| My favorite is "[Let's] go home", which is what I use to
| navigate back to my house via Apple Maps.
|
| There's also sending messages to people - you can send voice
| messages ("send a voice message to X"), which works decently
| well and avoids transcription failures.
| artificial wrote:
| This is even better, I usually use "navigate home". Thanks
| for sharing the voice message bit!
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I often leave home with just my Apple Watch, and for the simple
| things I do with my watch voice control via Siri and some tapping
| on the screen is definitely good enough for me.
|
| I think that all the deep learning models for handling speech on
| the Apple Watch are run locally on the watch.
| csujoy wrote:
| Let's accept it! Apple sucks at anything that involves learning
| from large volumes of data.
| layer8 wrote:
| MacRumors' related article [0] has some more interesing details:
|
| > By 2018, the team working on Siri had apparently "devolved into
| a mess, driven by petty turf battles between senior leaders and
| heated arguments over the direction of the assistant." Siri's
| leadership did not want to invest in building tools to analyse
| Siri's usage and engineers lacked the ability to obtain basic
| details such as how many people were using the virtual assistant
| and how often they were doing so. The data that was obtained
| about Siri coming from the data science and engineering team was
| simply not being used, with some former employees calling it "a
| waste of time and money."
|
| > Many Apple employees purportedly left the company because it
| was too slow to make decisions or too conservative in its
| approach to new AI technologies, including the large-language
| models that underpin chatbots like ChatGPT. Apple CEO Tim Cook
| personally attempted to persuade engineers who helped Apple
| modernize its search technology to stay at the company, before
| they left to work on large-language models at Google.
|
| > Apple executives are said to have dismissed proposals to give
| Siri the ability to conduct extended back-and-forth
| conversations, claiming that the feature would be difficult to
| control and gimmicky.
|
| > Cook and other senior executives requested changes to Siri to
| prevent embarassing responses and the company prefers Siri's
| responses to be pre-written by a team of around 20 writers,
| rather than AI-generated. There were also specific decisions to
| exclude information such as iPhone prices from Siri to push users
| directly to Apple's website instead.
|
| > Siri engineers working on the feature that uses material from
| the web to answer questions clashed with the design team over how
| accurate the responses had to be in 2019. The design team
| demanded a near-perfect accuracy rate before the feature could be
| released.
|
| > Engineers claim to have spent months persuading Siri designers
| that not every one of its answers needed human verification, a
| limitation that made it impossible to scale up Siri to answer the
| huge number of questions asked by users. Similarly, Apple's
| design team repeatedly rejected the feature that enabled users to
| report a concern or issue with the content of a Siri answer,
| preventing machine-learning engineers from understanding
| mistakes, because it wanted Siri to appear "all-knowing."
|
| > In 2019, the Siri team explored a project to rewrite the
| virtual assistant from scratch, codenamed "Blackbird." The effort
| sought to create a lightweight version of Siri that would
| delegate the creation of functions to app developers and would
| run on iPhones instead of the cloud to improve performance and
| privacy. Demos of Blackbird apparently prompted excitement among
| Apple employees owing to its utility and responsiveness.
| Blackbird competed with the work of two senior leaders on the
| Siri team who were responsible for helping Siri understand and
| respond to queries. These individuals pushed for their own
| project, codenamed " Siri X," for the 10th anniversary of the
| virtual assistant. The project simply aimed to move Siri's
| processing on-device for privacy reasons, without the
| lightweight, modular functionality of Blackbird. Hundreds of
| employees working on Blackbird were assigned to Siri X, which
| killed the ambitious project to make Siri more capable.
|
| This seems completely dysfunctional.
|
| [0] https://www.macrumors.com/2023/04/27/report-details-
| turmoil-...
| IOT_Apprentice wrote:
| Build a new team, start over, add in LLM & go for it.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| When your miss rate from experience is stuck around 20-30% for
| almost a decade, there is no future
| ninkendo wrote:
| I'd love to see a survey of people's hit/miss rate with Siri, but
| with the extra dimension of what accent they have and how thick
| it is. IME, Siri's speech recognition is actually quite fantastic
| (I almost _never_ have an issue with a dictated text message
| saying the wrong thing), but:
|
| - I have a very standard midwest american accent
|
| - I talk to siri like I'm a pilot talking to ATC: As clearly and
| succinctly as possible, never saying "umm", "uh", or having to
| correct myself, etc (this is actually an acquired skill that
| takes time)
|
| - I generally know what things Siri can do well and what it can't
| (I try to phrase things in ways I know is less likely for Siri to
| misinterpret)
|
| My theory is that most people who have a bad experience either
| have a thick accent (and importantly don't set the Siri language
| to something that matches their accent! there are multiple
| "English" settings in the Siri language, pick one that matches
| your accent!), don't speak clearly/mumble, have a lot of noise in
| the environment, or some combination of the above.
| [deleted]
| mgkimsal wrote:
| Years ago, it seemed Siri would try to understand you via
| whatever voice accent you'd chosen _it_ to speak in. If you
| wanted UK Siri, it would understand... a UK accent. Using a
| Siri UK voice, and speaking with a US midwest accent wouldn 't
| always get you what you expected.
|
| I tried an Australian test, and did a (bad) video of it here:
| https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/207295417
|
| Note this was... 8 years ago maybe? I forget exactly, but it
| doesn't seem to work this way any more.
| ninkendo wrote:
| Your video doesn't show you changing the Siri voice though,
| you're telling it _your_ accent. There's "Language", which is
| your accent ("English (Australia)" in your case), and then
| "Siri Voice", which is set to "Australian (Female)". So of
| course if you tell it you have an Australian accent, but then
| speak with an American accent, words like "Light" will get
| confused, because the en_US "Light" sounds like the en_AU
| "Late".
|
| If you have an American accent but want Siri to speak with an
| Australian one, set "Language" to "English - USA", but then
| set "Siri Voice" to Australian. Don't set Language to
| something that isn't your accent!
| paracyst wrote:
| Because it sucks. I tell it to turn off all of my alarms and
| instead it ends up calling my mother at 4 in the morning, causing
| her to panic, thinking there's an emergency.
| 64operator wrote:
| It used to be smarter, I think they dumbed it down to save money
| or something.
| heliophobicdude wrote:
| I switched to typing to Siri instead of using my voice [1]. I
| also disabled all triggers for Siri. Now I invoke it by pressing
| power button then type away.
|
| It's more useful than dictating when I need something quick and
| discretely.
|
| When chatbots arrive on iPhone, this is how I'll be talking to
| it.
|
| 1: https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/type-to-siri-ios/
| MrFantastic wrote:
| Since iOS 16, Siri has gotten dramatically less accurate for me
| on my Iphone 13 Pro.
|
| WebGL has been screwed since 16.4
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| My favorite
|
| Me: 16 minutes
|
| Siri: your timer is set for 16 minutes
|
| Me: 17 minutes
|
| Siri: 17 minutes and counting
|
| Me: 18 minutes
|
| Siri: I don't understand that
| rickreynoldssf wrote:
| It doesn't help that Apple doesn't let third party developers use
| it. The only SDK available for Homepod, is locked behind a bunch
| of approvals and the only thing it does is allow developers to
| implement music players. It's very specific to playing music. Not
| even Podcasts.
|
| Why can't an eCommerce app implement, "Hey Siri, tell Online
| Store to add Tidepods to my weekly order". ?
|
| What about Audible implementing, "Hey Siri, tell Audible to add
| Tale of Two Cities to my reading list." ?
|
| There's remnants of a car service interface that never got used
| or shipped AFAIK. If you ask "Hey Siri, get me an Uber to the
| train station". It just replies "sorry, I help with rides".
|
| Or maybe even work with other Apple stuff better. I can say "Hey
| Siri, turn on Television" and that works and then say "Hey Siri,
| mute television" and it will reply, "There are no televisions to
| control".
| augment003 wrote:
| This is simply false, or at the very least outdated. Apps can
| definitely implement custom intents for Siri:
|
| https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
| rickreynoldssf wrote:
| Not on Homepod, the most likely device Siri would be used on.
| izzydata wrote:
| It would be funny if voice controlled devices came into being and
| disappeared before I even bothered to try them.
| [deleted]
| throwaway_ab wrote:
| I use Siri to turn on/off voice control which lets me control my
| iPhone without touching it (it's a disability feature).
|
| When I no longer need voice control I use Siri to turn it off (I
| have my voice control set to label all actionable buttons on the
| screen so I like to turn it off when using my phone via touch.)
|
| I'm not visually impaired however I find voice control super
| useful when I want control of my phone and rather not use touch
| or in a situation where touch is impractical.
|
| Whilst Siri is good for certain tasks it lacks the ability to
| control every aspect of the phone whereas voice control is
| literally a replacement for touch control.
|
| By combining Siri and voice control I get fine grained complete
| control of every app when I need it, all enabled/disabled via my
| voice. Such a brilliant combination.
|
| Apple's attention to this disability feature is incredible. I
| only learnt about it after a visually impaired friend showed me
| how it works.
|
| I learnt that voice control/voice over is the reason most
| visually impaired people use iPhone due to Apple's dedication to
| building world leading accessibility features.
| 0x6c6f6c wrote:
| This is a surprising testimonial.
|
| My wife switched from a Pixel to iPhone and has utterly hated
| Siri and voice assist on iOS to the point she'd rather just
| deal with her hand pain. And it's a lot of pain.
|
| I've listened to see how bad it can be at understanding her,
| and it's appalling.
| WonderBuilder wrote:
| Honestly, I find Siri the most powerful popular voice assistant
| out there. Once you starting using Shortcuts, you can use Siri
| for literally anything. With just holding the power button, and a
| couple words, I can start tracking a run, schedule message a
| friend, record my thoughts, close all my tabs that contain the
| word "youtube"... And so much more!
|
| Shortcuts & Siri is honestly the main reason I switched from
| Android to iOS.
| 23B1 wrote:
| I'm a screenwriter and my focus is on character NO MATTER WHAT.
| We watch movies because we love the characters inside the plot,
| inside the universe, and how they relate to each other. CHARACTER
| is the CORE DRIVER of all stories, be it the story of Beowulf or
| Star Wars or Succession. Period.
|
| Today, I am fortunate enough to be developing 'characters' and
| backstories for AI companies, and I think its working; the new
| prototypes I've been working on really feel more warm (or more
| logical, or more relatable, or more philosophical, depending on
| what we're trying to transmit).
|
| I think a lot of AI companies are really missing this important
| point, and I think Apple, of all companies, should have got this!
| snapetom wrote:
| I live 20 miles away from work. 3 times a week, I have to go in.
| For a while, every morning, I ask Siri directions to [name of my
| company] to gauge how bad traffic is and how long it will take.
| Every time, she gives me directions to some pub in Saskatchewan,
| 18 hour drive away, that shares no part of their name with the
| name of my company.
|
| I just gave up.
|
| Alexa is not much better. I set up voice recognition to turn on
| my espresso machine (Rocket is the brand). Every morning I wake
| up, I tell her to turn on my Rocket. For about 3 months, things
| worked perfectly. All of a sudden, half the time, she instead
| starts playing "She's a Rocket" by Robert Ealey, a thirty year-
| old song.
| K7PJP wrote:
| > For a while, every morning, I ask Siri directions to [name of
| my company] to gauge how bad traffic is and how long it will
| take.
|
| My work address is in my own contact entry. I'd just ask Siri
| to take me to work.
| bricedouglas wrote:
| Not surprised. No major expansion in functionality for years
| purpleblue wrote:
| Siri is mostly useless. It works about half the time for me. When
| I ask it to do a task like create a timer, it works, but asking
| it questions is almost useless. One time I asked "What is a
| picometer?" and it gave an answer from Wikipedia, but then I
| immediately asked "What is a femtometer?" and it said it couldn't
| answer it on the iPhone. My wife gets amused whenever I use Siri
| because half the time I'll start swearing in frustration at how
| stupid it is, and yet like Charlie Brown and Lucy, I keep trying
| to kick that football.
| dna_polymerase wrote:
| "This is what I found on the web for XYZ"... all the time!
|
| At this point, they should just pipe the #1 search result into
| ChatGPT for a nice summary and have Siri read that out loud. It
| would be so much better.
| jandrese wrote:
| Yes! My big complaint about Siri is that she's just the same
| old "here is a list of preprogrammed actions you can perform,
| with a fallback to just dumping it in a Google searchbox" but
| you don't get access to the list. So finding what she can do
| involves outright guessing, scouring the web, or closely
| watching Apple demos. She can do quite a bit, but you'll
| never find 90+% of the options because Apple only shows you a
| small handful of suggestions.
|
| https://support.apple.com/siri
|
| Discoverability is a huge problem. Also, Siri can't launch
| apps, which seems like it should be an extremely common
| operation. "Hey Siri, launch Words with Friends".
| DHPersonal wrote:
| Try "Hey Siri, open Words with Friends"; at least on my
| iPhone, Siri can usually open apps for me when I use that
| phrasing.
| rednerrus wrote:
| I've switched to using a Chat-GPT shortcut in lieu of Siri and
| it's absolutely amazing. Apple should figure out how to license
| GPT and run Siri through it.
| heliophobicdude wrote:
| Hi! Could you please share details of how yours works?
| rednerrus wrote:
| https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/448738a9ae9b4a5b9a647cb29ea.
| ..
| hinkley wrote:
| I don't know if it's programmed in or just cargo culting but if
| Siri accidentally triggers and starts talking to you, "Nobody
| asked you Siri" is my favorite way to get it to stop interacting.
|
| Said in the tone of Cobie Smulders in How I Met Your Mother
| (Nobody asked you PATRICE!)
| esafak wrote:
| I tell google to STFU
| MH15 wrote:
| Siri recently started mispronouncing simple words that it never
| mistook before on my iPhone. Phrases like "It's 65 degrees
| outside" now sound like "It ess 65". Really odd.
| idk1 wrote:
| Two pretty consistent frustrating issues I have are:
|
| Me: "Hey Siri, tell my Mike I'll send that document over in ten
| mins. How about pizza for lunch. I also spoke to Jenny and she
| would come for lunch too."
|
| Siri: "Calling mike."
|
| So cannot tell the difference between 'tell' and 'call', however
| Siri could use context and assume if I'm talking for quite a
| while after saying maybe tell or maybe call then it's most likely
| 'tell' because of the sentences afterwards. This is by far the
| most frustrating.
|
| Second issue is:
|
| Me: "Hey Siri - what's in my calendar today."
|
| Siri: "Playing alternative radio station."
|
| Such a tremendous amount of times music has started playing, I
| think the top thing on their "can't understand" code is to try
| and play music. About once a week Siri will take something I say
| about anything and start playing music instead. It's infuriating.
| I've deleting music from my phone but I can't delete it from TV /
| Homepod Mini / Mac.
|
| Edit: I've thought of a third which isn't so bad.
|
| Me: "Ask Hassan has the mortgage has gone out yet?"
|
| Siri: "Here's your message. `has the Moorgate has gone out yet.`"
|
| It will replace random words in sentences with locations, and
| locations, in the UK, any word it cannot get, it will first
| assume I'm talking about any town in the UK and use one of those.
| It is ludicrous the amount of priority it gives to names of
| towns, I've even had tiny villages inserted into sentences
| before.
| nimbleplum40 wrote:
| I have the same experience...
|
| Me before bed: "Hey siri - turn off the lights"
|
| Siri: "Playing death metal"
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Can tell they downgraded the long range microphones somewhere
| between iPhone 4 and 7, might be even worse in later models
| because it really struggles to pick up you shouting across the
| room at it when it used to work pretty well on the 4.
|
| Then again the only thing I've used it for since launch is
| setting timers, rarely gets that right these days.
| lldb wrote:
| I don't think the iPhone 4 had always on siri.
| moepstar wrote:
| It had, as long as the phone was charging.
|
| IIRC, "always on" Siri came with the 4s
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I get that they're wary of an LLM-based Siri making embarrassing
| mistakes. It would be a _bad look_ if some kid 's phone provided
| helpful instructions for killing themselves when asked. Mummy and
| Daddy would sue.
|
| However, directly answering queries is not the only way LLMs can
| be used. In fact, when ChatGPT 4 came out, the first thing I
| thought of was: "Wow, this could make Siri so much better!"
|
| For example, an LLM like GPT coupled with voice recognition was
| used to create Whisper, an AI that has nearly perfect text-from-
| audio recognition. One of my biggest gripes with Siri is that it
| is basically useless in a car because even slight background
| noise confuses its voice recognition. An LLM would fix this.
|
| Another point is that many people don't realise that LLMs re-read
| their entire input for every word they generate! Their writing
| speed is so-so, but they can read _really fast_ even when running
| on mobile device hardware. Think 10K to 100K words per second. An
| LLM could read through all of the text on your device when
| prompted for search queries in a fraction of a second. As long as
| this was carefully set up, it wouldn 't be able to produce "bad
| output", because it would just be matching data to your prompt.
|
| E.g.: Imagine GPT being prompted with: "Does this email match the
| query <q>? Say only YES if it does or NO if it does not. <email>"
|
| It doesn't matter if it occasionality hallucinates and outputs
| gibberish, you just mark that as a "NO" and move on. This is also
| very easy to train out of a specialised version of the model
| using reinforcement learning.
|
| PS: I just played around with GPT 4 to see how it behaves when
| asked to recognise requests for creating calendar entries, and
| it's _pretty good_. For example, it can correctly compute things
| like "next long weekend". Interestingly, ChatGPT 4 is _already_
| doing some similar prompt injection, and I can 't override its
| sense of "current time".
|
| Apple's Siri team has failed really badly. Everyone else is
| sprinting away while they're not even aware there's a race going
| on.
| caycep wrote:
| I think reading the Information article, there were 2 issues,
| which it wasn't good at separating. The AI model sophistication
| and usage are one - and yeah, I think they could be more
| creative in using LLMs and such. But the other one seems to be
| a back end issue, i.e. that brief mention of "clunky database
| slowing down iterations/upgrades". That always seems to be an
| Apple Achilles heel...and I'd hope also they are NOT using that
| terrible IT infrastructure company (Agilent or whatever) to
| outsource their backend...
| circuit10 wrote:
| > Another point is that many people don't realise that LLMs re-
| read their entire input for every word they generate!
|
| Not every word, for every generation (which on something like
| ChatGPT is a message)
|
| > they can read really fast even when running on mobile device
| hardware. Think 10K to 100K words per second
|
| That's definitely not right, I'll try to find some numbers
| locusofself wrote:
| I'm excited for a GPT or similar voice assistant. Asking siri
| basic questions and having it tell me it will send me some links
| on my phone is annoying. I have homepods in the living room and
| they aren't good for much besides music.
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| Siri is not that bad, considering that Google Assistant is not
| great either.
|
| What do people use it for? mostly just to set alarms or turn of
| lights etc.
|
| With all this breakthrough in AI and things like Whisper which
| brings incredible voice recognition, these tools are ripe for an
| upgrade even though they have been stagnant for years.
|
| ChatGPT like abilities + voice assistant and these 'voice
| assistants' are relevant again and actually deliver on there
| original promise.
| ghaff wrote:
| At least Siri doesn't pester you to buy various things or to use
| it for additional purposes like Alexa does as far as I know.
|
| But, yeah, all the voice assistants are pretty bad or at least
| bad enough that I mostly give up trying to use them for anything
| other than certain rote tasks. Siri may or may not be marginally
| worse but none of them are good enough to, say, really use hands-
| off in a car unless I've carefully pre-defined tasks to perform.
| (e.g. pick from a handful of memorized playlist names).
| noncoml wrote:
| > At least Siri doesn't pester you to buy various things or to
| use it for additional purposes like Alexa does as far as I
| know.
|
| I was pretty happy with Alexa until they started that crap.
| Retired it immediately. Now I only have a HomePod but even on
| this I have Siri disabled.
|
| Amazon screwed the reputation of the voice robots for everyone
| mataug wrote:
| > Amazon screwed the reputation of the voice robots for
| everyone
|
| I don't think amazon screwed the reputation of anyone's
| assistant but their own. Plenty of people I know use voice
| assistants at home, none use Alexa.
|
| Voice assistants are genuinely useful for some scenarios,
| especially in the smart home space.
| mataug wrote:
| This is exactly the reason why I replaced all Amazon echo
| devices with HomePods. Siri makes many mistakes, doesn't hear
| me correctly, doesn't understand me correctly, and so many
| other issues. I can tolerate all these mistakes that Alexa also
| makes.
|
| I just cannot tolerate Alexa talking back to me, especially
| when I'm trying to do something important. I've lost my train
| of thought too many times because of Alexa.
| cubefox wrote:
| Why not use Google Nest? It has Google Assistant, which seems
| to be better than Siri.
| mataug wrote:
| Just preference honestly, we have a lot of apple devices,
| and it's nice to be able to keep things consistent. If we
| both had Android Phones we would've probably used Google
| assistant.
| jlund-molfese wrote:
| Same with Google Home! One too many times, I asked it what
| temperature it was outside, and it went on some monologue
| about how I should try asking it to give me a summary of my
| day or something.
|
| The optimal amount of times a product should interrupt your
| workflow to tell you about a new feature is 1 or fewer.
| deergomoo wrote:
| Gah, my mother has a few Echoes dotted about her house and it's
| the only inanimate object I feel compelled to tell to shut the
| hell up on a regular basis.
|
| Give me a direct response if warranted, otherwise a simple
| chime or acknowledgement. Multiple years into ownership no-one
| wants a "by the way..." with upsells to other Amazon services.
|
| It's even worse if the reason you were talking to it in the
| first place is to turn something down so you can actually speak
| to someone.
| thefourthchime wrote:
| I HATE that it does that, it made me try to move to Homepods,
| but even with Homebridge I couldn't get everything to work
| with Homepods. Also, it has its own drawbacks, like no screen
| to see a timer.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| Make a routine with these commands. It has to run daily
| because those cowards at amazon aren't quite ready to let us
| off the upsell leash.
|
| 1. Set volume to 0
|
| 2. "Turn off by the way"
|
| 3. Set volume back to your preferred.
|
| I wonder what the conversion on 'by the way' is. Like how
| many BTWs have played and how many customers have taken alexa
| up on that offer?
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| "By the way" is alexa's entire business model. They sell
| these devices at a loss and don't require a subscription
| for the nlp so they can "by the way" you into buying random
| shit. I'm surprised they let you mute it at all, especially
| after devices lost $10 billion last year.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| Then maybe it should try to make a sale instead of
| blathering on about how I can ask it what sound does a
| pig make.
|
| They have 15 years of purchase history, prime video
| usage, and presumably are snooping on what podcasts I
| play over Echo. They should be able to suck a little
| less. Any random page of a 20 year old sears catalog
| would carry more relevance to me than anything Alexa has
| suggested.
| cubefox wrote:
| I wonder why they sell these things at a loss. Wouldn't
| they sell at cost?
| ghaff wrote:
| Internal cost accounting is complicated.
| cubefox wrote:
| At 10 billion dollars the accounting doesn't have to be
| precise.
| devmor wrote:
| I'm glad I'm not the only one. I find it annoying, intrusive and
| not useful for anything at all.
|
| The only times I ever try to use it intentionally (like asking it
| to take a note, or make a hands free call while I'm driving) - it
| screws up or requires clarification to which I have to give
| screen attention, defeating the purpose.
|
| Most of the time it just pops up and annoys me when I call my
| wife "sweetie".
| ianferrel wrote:
| Siri seems to be actively getting worse to me. Not necessarily at
| understanding commands, but at the verbosity of its replies.
|
| Recently, when I ask it to "Send a text to <name> that says
| <content of text>" it says something like "I notice you often
| send texts to <name> using Apple Messages, so I will use that for
| this text. Is that Ok?" before reading me back the text and then
| sending it. I'm sure that there are people out there who have a
| rich and complicated mapping of text-communication-app to
| recipients, but I literally have only one text communication app
| on my phone, the one that it came with, and I only ever use that.
| It's already annoyingly slow to interact with Siri on a multi-
| step process, and adding _another_ step to it is awful.
| bluejekyll wrote:
| Ok, maybe I'm an outlier here, but I love Siri on my HomePods. It
| does what I want in enough cases that it's useful, multiple
| timers while cooking, setting them and canceling them when I am
| putting things in or taking it out of the oven.
|
| Granted, I have very few things I use it for, but I like it. The
| kids like them in their rooms too. I'm happy with Siri, but maybe
| I don't ask it to do much.
| robbyking wrote:
| That's the trick with Siri. I use it on my Apple Watch when I'm
| riding my bike with an AirPod in: "Siri, play this podcast," or
| "Siri, call so-and-so."
|
| I think the secret is low expectations.
| bluejekyll wrote:
| I send text messages with it while on my bike as well. It
| usually works fine and gets the point across.
| aroundtown wrote:
| Apple and other mega corps really need to spend some money
| investing in training/education for these highly specific fields.
| Advancement in Siri shouldn't be dependent on 3 people that were
| lost to Google.
|
| I know a bunch of capable programmers that would love the chance
| to go into one of these specialties but don't have the resources
| nor opportunities (time/money/location) to go back to school.
|
| Siri could be so much better.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| This is a nonstory, tbh.
|
| The reality is Apple deeply cares about releasing a polished
| product. Releasing an LLM-based Siri that makes really bad gaffes
| would be a PR nightmare. Google already suffered that when it
| opened up Bard despite pushback from folks working on it.
|
| The fundamentals of LLM architectures, training, etc. are now no
| longer "secret sauce" tons of major tech companies are working on
| in-house LLMs at this point. I don't see Apple as not having a
| future for Siri, it's rather a silly conclusion that doesn't have
| much behind it at all
| smt88 wrote:
| > _The reality is Apple deeply cares about releasing a polished
| product_
|
| This is absolutely untrue in the Tim Cook era. Apple releases
| buggy hardware and software all the time.
|
| _This article_ talks about how they released a bad product and
| know it. Siri is significantly worse than both Google Assistant
| and Alexa, and even those are comically bad sometimes.
|
| Bugs in iOS and Siri give me rage aneurysms every single day
| (coming from a long-time Android user who just wanted a small
| phone).
| mrguyorama wrote:
| If you think this is limited to Tim Cook, you weren't paying
| attention. Every single release of macbooks had issues with
| heat killing GPUs and similar and apple always denied it
| being a design defect.
|
| Didn't steve jobs sit behind antennagate and bendgate?
| smt88 wrote:
| The software was significantly more polished in the Jobs
| era. I don't know why, because it's not like it's something
| Jobs obsessed over more than Cook. Apple just doesn't seem
| to have "good software" in their DNA.
| pschuegr wrote:
| Yep. The reality is that Apple cares deeply about slick
| marketing.
|
| I've had great experiences with Apple hardware, personally,
| but the software frequently makes me shake my head.
| michelb wrote:
| The reasons sound very Apple-like. The current template-based
| Siri is not cutting it, but I do get the fact Apple does not want
| Siri to give wrong or incorrect info. People already go bonkers
| if an Apple Maps route is incorrect. Given that the current LLM's
| are routinely giving false information, I'm betting Apple is
| simply waiting on another leap or two in models, and slowly
| rewriting Siri in the meantime.
|
| I'm having a good time playing with LLM's, but I certainly don't
| trust any output at face value. I know I would value a correct
| answer from Siri, or any other service.
| neurobama wrote:
| I generally like Siri and rarely experience bugs. I use it to set
| timers, get the weather, play music via Spotify, occasionally
| dictate text messages, and look up trivia mid-conversation. It's
| been my replacement for Alexa ever since I got creeped out by
| Amazon's audio data retention. In this context I'm suprised to
| hear Apple employees are unhappy with it.
| SllX wrote:
| I gave Siri a lot of time and forgiveness before writing it off
| as an interface to set timers and literally nothing else, and
| even that Siri fails often enough to annoy me. I can imagine
| there's a happy medium for other people, but I'm unsurprised
| that with as big a workforce Apple has now, there's a
| contingent there with exactly the same opinions as a lot of us
| out here. Siri sucks, unless it doesn't for you, but it still
| sucks for the rest of us.
| OkGoDoIt wrote:
| I use Siri to set reminders except it is completely unable to
| handle reminders like "remind me this afternoon to follow up
| with Joe about the event on June 25". It sees the June 25 and
| the reminder is now for the afternoon of June 25. I manage a
| theater, so this is a very very common scenario and it's super
| frustrating. It speaks to there being no real understanding
| going on, just pattern matching on things that look like dates.
| I don't need GPT4, but surely we can do better than this.
| kgwxd wrote:
| You could use shorthand for date and times in the title. I
| tried your prompt saying "J N 2 5" instead but apparently
| "this afternoon" is 5PM, so that's odd.
| jamil7 wrote:
| > I use it to set timers
|
| Yeah, literally all I use it for is to set a timer when I've
| put warm beer in the freezer.
| daotoad wrote:
| How do you get Siri to actually work with Spotify?
|
| When I try to use it I get consistently laughably bad results.
| `Play songs by Albert King on Spotify` yields something like
| "Playing songs by R Kelly on Spotify". No, thanks.
|
| Even when I ask for songs, albums, or artists I have saved in
| my library, Siri invariably finds something else entirely
| unrelated to play.
|
| What's really frustrating is that this used to work reasonably
| well for me.
| esafak wrote:
| Same for Google. I don't understand how it's got _worse_ not
| better, given advances in machine learning.
| gimme_treefiddy wrote:
| Is it just me or Siri is very bad at picking up accents (mine
| isn't that bad having lived in the US for a while) and
| background noise.
|
| One of the more impressive things about using the Google's
| voice assistant was, it did very well in noisy environments.
| Whereas with Siri, that is quite a bit of struggle. This is
| only about speech-to-text, not text-to-whatever.
| neurobama wrote:
| It deals with my oven fan and similar regular kitchen noise
| pretty well. I hold it close to my mouth at parties, so I
| can't really compare it to e.g. Google Home or Alexa's far-
| field capability.
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| Hey Siri, "add 2 minutes to the timer". It can't even do
| something so basic as that.
| neurobama wrote:
| The inability to set multiple simultaneous timers is
| annoying. I compensate by setting multiple alarms. "Delete
| all my alarms" works when I'm done, but it's certainly a
| hack.
| vpribish wrote:
| "hey siri, start a 10 minute timer for the oven"
|
| "hey siri, set a 30 minute timer for the rice."
|
| it works just fine for me, use it all the time.
| neurobama wrote:
| Doesn't work for me. I get this:
|
| >There's already a [number] minute timer. Replace?
| Confirm/Cancel
|
| Running iOS 16.1, so unless they added this feature in
| the last few months I'm not sure why we'd see different
| results.
|
| edit: Perhaps you're using HomePod? Apparently Siri on
| HomePod supports multiple timers, while Siri on iPhone
| does not. Goofy.
| nneonneo wrote:
| My _Apple Watch_ supports multiple timers, and yet my
| _iPhone_ does not (iOS 16.4.1).
|
| I mean, I guess a watch is supposed to be for telling
| time or whatever, but this is just a weird feature
| omission...
| jamiek88 wrote:
| siri definitely has multiple timers. BUT you can only
| have two though and it only works on Apple Watch and
| HomePods.
|
| I know, right?
|
| Also a little known hack to set a timer you don't have to
| say the whole thing just press the Siri button or say hey
| siri 'n minutes' and it will set a timer for n minutes.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| On Alexa I run many times simultaneously. Didn't know it
| was a special feature. I just name them.
|
| Latest update(?) it quit announcing expiration by name if
| only one was running. Just beeps, and maybe I forgot what
| it was supposed to be timing. Annoying.
|
| Especially annoying if more than one person in the house is
| setting timers.
| dylan604 wrote:
| if you're using an anonymous timer, then it is difficult to
| access it later. you might have better luck if you set an id
| to reference later.
|
| timerId = setTimer(float time);
|
| function updateTimer(timerId) {};
|
| maybe wrap that in a class, and use that when using Siri. you
| just have to speak the class definition first.
|
| Hey Siri! set a timer using myCustomClassTimer!
| DHPersonal wrote:
| It does have that ability on the HomePod minis that I have
| around the house. If a timer is set on one of them and then I
| want to reset it or add minutes to it, I can do so (but only
| when that HomePod mini hears me).
| jamiek88 wrote:
| It works on watch and HomePod only.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Same experience. I use it for the same purposes and it's great
| for hands-free, screen-free interaction of these simple tasks.
| nailer wrote:
| I have Alexa and I hate it as well as hating Siri. At this
| point when bing (and maybe Google IDK) can handle general
| knowledge questions with AI answers (and a disclaimer) I
| basically consider Alexa / Siri unmaintained.
| yellowait44 wrote:
| Siri is also quite terrible at setting Homekit Scene. I totally
| gave up on it. For example I have a scene named "Play Music
| Everywhere" and even if I tell it explicitely with "Hey Siri
| set scene Play Music Everywhere" it fails miserably. Also
| simple task like: "Hey Siri play music on all HomePods" ends up
| with "Ok playing music Everywhere". When did I say
| everywhere??? I only want you to play on Homepods!
| neurobama wrote:
| I worked for several years in IoT and as a consequence avoid
| smart home stuff like the plague, so this hasn't been a
| problem for me.
| nanidin wrote:
| Yesterday: "Hey Siri, watch a movie in the dark" "Ok setting
| scene watch a movie in the dark"
|
| Today: "Hey Siri, watch a movie in the dark" "I can't find a
| movie called In the Dark."
|
| I also had a very frustrating issue randomly start happening
| because one of my lights had the word "lamp" or "light" in
| it. Thankfully googling the symptoms found others with the
| same problem and a solution, but it was baffling as there
| hadn't been any changes made by me in over a year prior.
| smt88 wrote:
| > _I generally like Siri and rarely experience bugs_
|
| This is mind-blowing to me because I'd guess that ~50% of my
| interactions with Siri are buggy. I mostly use it through
| CarPlay.
|
| It even fails to call the correct contact in my phone, which
| should be the easiest thing it does.
| matthewfcarlson wrote:
| I'd argue that microphones in the car are laughably bad,
| which probably hurts recognition. But it should be better.
| smt88 wrote:
| A) This happens whether in the car or not, and in the car
| I'm often using AirPods to get better noise cancellation.
| There's no excuse for this. I could talk to my Pixel 5
| while driving from across the car.
|
| B) It's not always a recognition thing. Siri often knows
| what I said and has a completely baffling response to it.
| butlike wrote:
| I generally find Voice Over Utility to work better, in terms of
| available commands and what it can do, but it's also harder to
| use.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _I use it to set timers, get the weather, play music via
| Spotify, occasionally dictate text messages, and look up trivia
| mid-conversation._
|
| I use my Google Home similarly. But understand that these use-
| cases are utterly trivial, and Siri (by most accounts) and
| Google (from experience) still manage to get them wrong too
| often. It's unbelievable.
|
| I have Google Home products and a YouTube Premium subscription.
| By 1 of 10 times when I ask for music it'll default to Spotify,
| which I have never used. How? Why? One of my speakers now
| reacts to every request with an error when it's not the primary
| speaker being spoken to.
|
| It's a novelty, nothing more. I wouldn't rely on this stuff for
| anything. In fact, it's a bug or two away from being
| permanently removed.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| That's exactly how Siri is supposed to be used.
|
| If it can do something -- well, that's the usecase. It just
| works.
|
| If it can't do - then why would even one be trying to do that!
| That's not how it's done.
|
| That's the Apple way. And that's exactly how Siri is perfect!
| jaypeg25 wrote:
| Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant are all generally good at
| those things but honestly not much else. I use my Google Home
| every day for timers and to turn on/off lights. I don't think
| any of them will ever be the helpful AI that they were
| initially promoted as, though.
| Pxtl wrote:
| I'm shocked how much the quality of Google Assistant has
| degraded over time.
|
| I have a Mini that consistently misunderstands broadcast
| requests and says "sorry I'm not playing anything right now".
| When it occasionally speech-to-text converts a broadcast
| word, it consistently cuts off the first word or letter, even
| when it's "I'll be right down" users will get "L L be right
| down".
|
| It used to support simple offline requests like SMS and
| Navigate when data was unavailable. No more.
|
| It used to integrate with Google Keep. No more.
|
| No longer recognizes the word "torch" as a synonym for
| flashlight. Why would I be asking to turn on my phone's
| "porch"?
|
| Painfully slow replies, even under ideal network
| environment... Just spinning forever, often until a timeout
| that it doesn't even have the decency to respond with a
| proper error message.
|
| It's just amazing how they launched a product with a clear
| "this is where we are, this is our vision of where we're
| going" and they _still sell it_ but instead they 're going in
| the opposite direction.
| esafak wrote:
| My pet theory is that they were launched by the A team, who
| got replaced by the B team when the A team left for greener
| pastures. Or maybe they got it working, but in a bid to get
| another promotion they kept tweaking it, making it worse in
| ways that matter to us but not the promotion committee.
| nneonneo wrote:
| See, at least Siri _usually_ is ready to take your input
| the moment you press the button, even if it then casually
| discards your input because it can't reach apple's servers
| or whatever.
|
| Google Maps: I swear, about half the time I try to activate
| voice search, it sits and spins before even accepting any
| voice input at all. Why can't it just start reading the
| microphone right when I activate it, and _then_ submit the
| saved audio whenever it's done getting set up? It's so
| abysmally poor that it's usually faster to scroll through
| recent destinations or literally grab the phone, unlock,
| and put in a destination.
|
| This is just a market begging to be disrupted. I want to
| see a startup combine Whisper, GPT, and a competent TTS
| model into a killer voice UI!
| Pxtl wrote:
| What flabbergasts me is how often the screen will display
| a successful speech-to-text capture, and then it poops
| the bed anyways. Like, you did it! You did the hard part!
| The part that feels like goddamned _magic_ to me,
| converting the noisy messy reality of sound-waves into
| text. And then it drops the ball on the simple pile of
| "if" statements it takes to convert that text into an
| action.
| neurobama wrote:
| >I don't think any of them will ever be the helpful AI that
| they were initially promoted as, though.
|
| I must disagree. ChatGPT-style LLM functionality with
| ElevenLabs-quality realtime voice synthesis will absolutely
| supercharge these products. The ability to e.g. answer kids'
| questions in simplified English according to parental prompt
| guidelines, or drill down on complex educational topics, or
| maintain context over many back-and-forth conversational
| interactions will be huge.
| genericacct wrote:
| Strongly agree, tons of educational and entertainment value
| will be unlocked.
| neurobama wrote:
| I'm really excited for LLM D&D dungeon masters.
| testfrequency wrote:
| You do know that Apple was also caught retaining raw request
| data from Siri as well, right?
|
| I'm also surprised you're surprised?
| Dennip wrote:
| I use Siri fairly frequently for setting timers, controlling my
| smart home and the like, but for me where it falls down is really
| understanding natural language. Personally I found that google
| assistant was way way ahead of siri in this regard. I could ask
| it to do something and it would just _understand_ what I want.
|
| One issue I frequently have with siri is that commands that work
| one day suddenly don't the next. If I ask siri to "lock screen"
| it tries to find smart home door locks (which i dont have)
| instead of locking the device screen, eventually I figure out
| some combination of lock device/screen/phone screen/off etc that
| works, so siri does know how to do this but isn't smart enough to
| figure out my intent.
|
| The other issue is that siri unlike google assistant can't
| maintain a train of thought, You can't say "hey siri dim the
| bedroom lights" and follow that up with "hey siri..a bit more"
| unlike with google where it seems to be aware of the context of
| what it did prior.
| RandomWorker wrote:
| The lock screen issue is really funny. Because I have the same
| experience where I will come home and say hey, Siri lock screen
| to close the navigation. However, now it doesn't seem to work
| anymore and I have tried some of your prompts and some
| combination does work.
| sorum wrote:
| > where it falls down is really understanding natural language.
|
| I would settle for Siri understanding simple commands. Natural
| language is something for Apple customers in the 2040s. I want
| to not have to use creative language skills to decipher things
| in Reminders. "Who is this Paul Cage I'm supposed to call? Oh,
| repairing the pool cage."
|
| Forget LLM or natural language processing; Siri needs to catch
| up to 2018's Google Assistant
| nanidin wrote:
| Amazon mitigated bad speech transcription by providing a link
| to listen to the underlying audio.
|
| Apple has never offered this and it has led to lots of head
| scratching at the grocery store as I work through my shopping
| list. It still beats trying to use the Alexa app while
| shopping, though.
| transcriptase wrote:
| 2023 Google Assistant needs to catch up to 2018 Google
| Assistant. It has become progressively worse since I invested
| a great deal into setting it up with smart-home devices in
| that very year.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| I also use it in a limited way and it's fairly successful. Just
| homekit turn on turn off and set scenes.
|
| However I have one frustrating bug with shortcuts that sends me
| over the moon. I have a little shortcut that just sends a
| simple text message when i say 'Hey siri, Sweetie' about 20% of
| the time siri comes back telling me about musical artist
| sweetie... it's braindead.
| huehehue wrote:
| Maybe it's the emerging neo-Luddite in me, but I'm alarmed at how
| many people begrudgingly continue to use these tools
| (accessibility reasons notwithstanding, which is an admittedly
| major caveat).
|
| I have a very low tolerance for error in things like setting
| timers, playing music, getting weather, calling someone. This is
| because I can complete these tasks simply, quickly, and with 100%
| reliability by hand. The marginal improvements allowed by tools
| like Siri aren't worth it to me if there is _any_ decrease in
| reliability.
|
| I'm sure there are use cases I'm not considering, but I've also
| seen perfectly able-bodied folks shout "call Steve" into their
| phone for 40 seconds longer than it would have taken to navigate
| manually. Conceptually, the idea of stacking _even more_
| engineering onto these tools to get these tasks working reliably
| is funny.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| It doesn't matter how frequently Siri gets things wrong, my
| wife insists on using it for everything. The number of times
| I've heard her repeat herself to Siri five times in an
| increasingly frustrated tone is pretty high. It's baffling.
| mmmmmbop wrote:
| Nah, I'll have to disagree with you there. I don't know about
| Siri, but I am one of those people using the Google Assistant
| to set timers and reminders, and for me at least, this is
| reliable (enough), and definitely faster than by hand.
|
| The obvious use case is setting a timer while cooking, when the
| phone is at the other end of the room and your hands may be
| dirty, but I'm using it even in non-cooking settings.
|
| In fact, I just tried it and timed both approaches for setting
| a reminder. Results:
|
| * Assistant: "Hey Google, set a reminder 10 days from now to
| file my taxes.": 4.5s to say it (I'm free to focus on other
| things after this point), 7.5s until reminder is created.
|
| * Manual (pick up & unlock phone, open app drawer, open
| Calendar app, find the day 10 days from now, click on that day,
| click create a reminder, type in "file my taxes", save): 17s
| huehehue wrote:
| > reliable (enough)
|
| This is the key thing, and the formula's different for
| everyone. I know that my strategy of "look at the clock and
| remember" will work until I'm senile, as will "panic-check
| the mail every day until my last tax form arrives and file
| that night"
| beerpls wrote:
| So Apple pumps more than a billion dollars into developing
| and marketing a virtual assistant which fails the vast
| majority of the time and you're proud of it because it can
| set a timer by voice?
|
| I'm just going to say - i'm underwhelmed
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| Siri is tremendously frustrating to me, but helpful to my
| parents whose eyes are going bad.
|
| For all Google's faults, the Google assistant is years ahead of
| Siri and Alexa at natural language comprehension. It's not
| perfect, but it clears my bar, and it comes in handy a few
| times per day.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| I found voice controls in _anything_ to be so clunky in the early
| 2010s that I just rolled my eyes at things like Siri and smart
| speakers. I 've never even tried them.
| adam_arthur wrote:
| What would Siri's market share be if you could easily install
| Google assistant on iPhone? How much more investment would Apple
| have put into Siri if they had to compete?
|
| I haven't noticed any improvement in Siri in close to a decade of
| being in the Apple ecosystem. The most frustrating thing is that
| every time I ask it to "turn the lights on", it thinks I'm saying
| "off". I grew up in the US and have no notable accent or mumble.
|
| Note that there are hacky ways to add google assistant, but it
| doesn't get integrated into the OS in the same way
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Do you actually use google assistant?
|
| The grass ain't greener, it is rubbish too.
| geuis wrote:
| I think I might be in the minority based on other comments here.
|
| I hate things like Siri and whatever Android phones have.
|
| It's incredibly rude every time I hear someone almost yelling
| into their phone in public. They get frustrated Siri doesn't work
| and loudly and slowly say whatever it is again like being mean to
| a dumb child.
|
| People speak out entire text messages and the replies. I'm not
| pointing out folks with disabilities. I'm talking about perfectly
| healthy adults who seem to have no sense of awareness around
| them.
|
| On my phone, I found it infuriating that Apple just inserted this
| Siri icon into the keyboard next to the spacebar. It took me a
| while to figure out how to disable it. I already have large
| hands, but my typing accuracy is pretty good and fast. When that
| icon was there, it reduced the width of the spacebar and return
| keys and made it impossible to type without Siri popping up every
| few lines.
|
| I think more broadly I have a prejudice against devices listening
| to me. I've never liked Alexa, Siri, or any other voice based
| automation system like customer support phone trees. Very rarely
| I've encounter a phone system that works well, but mostly these
| devices and systems are just infuriating to work with.
| javawizard wrote:
| > I'm not pointing out folks with disabilities. I'm talking
| about perfectly healthy adults who seem to have no sense of
| awareness around them.
|
| Careful. It's easy to overlook disabilities that may not be
| immediately externally visible.
|
| I have a friend who's heavily dyslexic. You'd never know it if
| you ran into her on the street; she's quite successful in her
| career. Yet she uses voice dictation when sending text messages
| because it's an order of magnitude less time and cognitive
| effort for her to write something out that way.
|
| I tend to think the world would be a better place if we were
| all just a little bit less judgemental of things we see others
| doing that we can't immediately explain.
| robocat wrote:
| > I'm talking about perfectly healthy adults who seem to have
| no sense of awareness around them.
|
| There's also a few DSM5[1] diagnostic categories that could
| cover that behaviour.
|
| However, it is a somewhat cultural behaviour - you see it
| more in some countries or places within a country - some
| people are just jerks.
|
| Perhaps they could just add "arsehole" as a new diagnostic
| category to cover highly inconsiderate people. Just needs
| better wording.
|
| [1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dsm5
| geuis wrote:
| That's a _very_ fair criticism. I hope no one reading my
| parent comment thinks I 'm disregarding people like your
| friend. I'm not.
|
| I'm referencing people who also think it's fine to loudly
| play music or have entire conversations with the phone
| speaker on in public.
| nineplay wrote:
| Every company has engineers who don't like some products or
| features. We aren't mindless corporates drones. I don't
| personally use any of my employer's applications.
|
| Some article like this comes up every so often and it's so non-
| newsworthy. Anyone who's been at a project planning meeting knows
| there's a small contingent of engineers in the corner muttering
| that it's a terrible idea and it will never work.
| neilv wrote:
| > _The report today explains that Google wanted these three
| engineers "badly enough that its CEO, Sundar Pichai, personally
| wooed the group."_
|
| How do they conduct the interviews, in that situation?
|
| Not the usual tech megacorp brogrammer "technical interview"
| hazing?
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Hopefully they skip that step but it is weird how often a
| recruiting process goes from having a recruiter cold contact
| you with platitudes singing your praises and how valuable you
| would be to their company and then the next step is to have a
| group of interviewers demanding to know why you're worthy of
| being in their presence while expecting you operate like a
| broken clone of Google and also recite CS theory that has never
| been even slightly applicable to the open position. But at
| least the 'inside-out condom' brain teaser has finally gone out
| of favor.
| neilv wrote:
| Sigh, I've been on the receiving end of that multiple times.
| :)
|
| In some companies (the ones that aren't just cargo-culting or
| on autopilot) I'd bet that someone in HR/compcommittee
| consciously intends it to be hazing rather than evaluation.
| Maybe theory like that it makes the company psychologically
| seem more attractive (the brain thinks, if you're jumping
| through hoops for them, there must be a reason), and to take
| candidate's ego down a notch so they're less demanding in
| compensation negotiation.
| catiopatio wrote:
| Generally, you sit down to a meal or coffee with the executive
| in question; they answer your questions and try to convince you
| to join.
|
| That conversation might span a few sit-downs or extend into
| e-mails.
|
| If you eventually say "yes", you'll be funneled into the hiring
| pipeline midstream, skipping the entire front-end process.
|
| It's largely a formality -- HR is told to hire you unless
| there's a glaring red flag.
|
| When I've been in that position, I wasn't even asked for my
| resume until _after_ we'd already negotiated my compensation,
| solely for inclusion in my HR file.
| rm_-rf_slash wrote:
| "Thank you for coming. As you know, I am a busy man so let's
| get started: iterating numbers 1 to 100, every third number
| print _Fizz_ ..."
| sharkweek wrote:
| I love my iPhone, it's a great device.
|
| However, quite literally the only two things I use Siri for are
| asking "what song is this?" and "set a timer for X minutes."
|
| I'm sure there are ways I could be using it for any number of
| things that might improve some routine process in my life, but I
| never found them.
| jurassicfoxy wrote:
| The most impressive thing I can get Siri to do is "Hey Siri,
| play my <playlist name> on Spotify", and it works consistently.
| "Hey Siri, reply." is another decent one, but it seems to be
| working poorly lately.
| wiredfool wrote:
| The timer, sometimes, and occasionally I try to get Siri to
| play something in the car so I don't have to look at my phone.
| It normally fails -- it will play something random from apple
| music before it plays anything from my library.
| mthoms wrote:
| This drives me nuts. I get it, sometimes albums and songs
| have similar names. It seems like Siri should be able to
| deduce which I'm asking for given I've listened to one album
| over a hundred times and never listened to the random thing
| with the same name it decides to pull up.
| nneonneo wrote:
| I'm frankly surprised that Siri hasn't moved to on-device voice
| recognition. It's by far my biggest complaint with Siri: random,
| unpredictable delays or outright failures to recognize simple
| messages because the network is unstable or unavailable.
|
| There's other trash too: the other day I tried asking Siri to
| play a song from my library, but it misinterpreted the song title
| and proceeded to _activate a seven day trial of Apple Music
| Voice_ to play some random track on Apple Music. I didn't ask for
| that subscription!
|
| To be fair, for the tiny subset of functionality I do use -
| navigate by voice, set timers, get terrible jokes to amuse
| passengers - it works fine.
| mrbombastic wrote:
| Yes, incredibly frustrating that to ask Siri to play a song
| from your library on your device you need a network connection.
| moconnor wrote:
| Siri does use on-device voice recognition. Active airplane mode
| and you can still use it.
|
| Edit: for some commands only it seems. I agree with OP, this is
| odd.
| shagie wrote:
| Its a question of if it can determine the intent (
| https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sirikit ) on device
| or if it needs to go to the cloud to understand it.
| yellowait44 wrote:
| Not on HomePods as far I as know.
| nneonneo wrote:
| Seems like it does - cool! - but why does it sometimes spin
| for several seconds when faced with a seemingly simple
| request? I'm guessing it has some path where it tries to use
| the network if possible, but if the network is spotty then
| the requests timeout and it reports a failure?
| ls612 wrote:
| It probably takes more time to run the analysis locally on
| a phone chip.
| cglong wrote:
| When Google brought the Assistant locally to the Pixel,
| one of the talking points was how much faster it was.
| IceWreck wrote:
| Whats the excuse for this ? Whisper is open source, resource
| efficient and can easily work on device. I wonder why they
| havent switched to that.
| deergomoo wrote:
| > because the network is unstable or unavailable
|
| All of Apple's services by and large handle spotty networks
| _horribly_.
|
| Take Apple Music for example: if you want to play music you've
| downloaded to your device, it's often better to switch into
| airplane mode, because with a present-but-poor signal it will
| still try to load album listings etc over the network, and sit
| there on a spinner.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| This is a common developer curse. I just ran into an issue at
| my job where customers were having an issue in the field that
| we just couldn't reproduce in the office; it took a long time
| to put together that the issue was related to failing
| downloads on sketchy networks because all of our networks are
| stable and fast.
| claytonjy wrote:
| Spotify is just as bad in this regard! It used to handle
| spotty connections flawlessly a few years ago, but at some
| point it was altered to keep trying to pull album art and
| track listings from the network even for downloaded albums.
| jackson1442 wrote:
| Not that this excuses it, but I've been able to get this to
| work by going into the "Downloaded" tab in the Music app.
| That seems to play directly off the device.
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| I hunch that on-device recognition leveraging the onboard ML
| hardware will be a whole new thing. The Siri brand is so
| damaged now I expect they'll launch something new instead of
| "but it's actually good now!"
| Animats wrote:
| "Assistant" type devices which can actually do things besides
| reply can't yet use large language models safely. LLMs need to
| get past the problem of making up stuff when they don't know
| something. Until then, it's not safe to give them power over
| devices.
| valine wrote:
| There's nothing particularly unsafe about LLMs. Giving Sirious
| access to a weather api and timers is not gonna break the
| world.
|
| If anything, giving LLMs access to apis makes them less likely
| to hallucinate.
| Animats wrote:
| Huh?
|
| If they have control of door locks, there's a problem.
| valine wrote:
| Why is that a problem? If you don't want the model to
| access your doors you disable it at the API level. Siri
| already has an option for that today.
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| They can - if we split it into parsing, execution and response.
| If LLMs only do parsing and response and execution is limited
| to actions that are prepogrammed, i think we'll have a much
| better assistant. Like, it could be interactive and natural.
| But i agrees that it shouldn't be given unfettered access to do
| whatever it wants.
| lynx23 wrote:
| Siri, don't make me even start. I like much of what Apple does,
| but Siri is just hilariously bad. The error rate at speech
| recognition seems to have gone up over the years. Keywords are
| randomly being changed, sometimes they fire, a day later you have
| to use a different phrase to get what you want. They even broke
| "Where am I" at least in German. "Wo bin ich" is sometimes
| replied to with "Sein oder nicht sein" (to be or not to be) which
| indicates Siri is trying to be smart and fails totally. I am
| blind and use this feature when I have a feeling I might have
| been lost. Very funny if you ask a simply question like "Where am
| I" and your voice-assistant is fucking with you about
| pseudophilosophically. "Was lauft gerade" did also just fail a
| few hours ago. Siri just started to play something from my
| library, which is not what I wanted. All in all, its a
| embarrasing failure all around. Oh, and before I forget, when
| Siri fails to understand the name of the person I want to call,
| it says "OK, I am calling <your name>" and actually tries to dial
| my own number. This is so dumb, it feels like a joke put in there
| by an intern.
| dmd wrote:
| I found this on the web for "make me even start".
| Avamander wrote:
| The worst part about Siri in my opinion is how it can do bulk
| actions when it mishears you. You want the ceiling light off?
| Okay, turning off all the lights. Or the opposite, it turns
| *everything* on, which can be even more annoying.
| heleninboodler wrote:
| It's also surprisingly unaware of how poorly it's performing.
| I have recently noticed that when you ask it to send text a
| text message for you, it follows up with a suggestion that
| you turn on auto-send for siri-dictated messages, even after
| it took you six tries to get it to understand you.
| pram wrote:
| They're all complete crap. I use Google Home to ONLY turn my
| lights on or off and it gets it like 60% of the time.
| Sometimes it accepts the command and it just doesn't even
| work and says something went wrong. Pressing the light button
| in the app is 100% consistent. Incredible.
| scottyah wrote:
| I've been superstitiously switching between "turn the
| lights off" and "turn off the lights" (also with music). It
| seems like every few weeks or days it prefers one over the
| other.
| matt_s wrote:
| The voice commands are worse than touch screens and touch
| screens are worse than the optimal solution which is a
| tactile interface of switches/knobs. I stopped using Alexa
| voice controls for lights since its inconsistent and switched
| to a bluetooth switch, much more reliable have only had a few
| instances where it didn't work.
|
| I don't do lots of home automation mostly because the
| automation isn't practical in a new build house that has
| switches in appropriate places. There are extremely rare
| circumstances where I want a light on/off in a room I'm not
| in. However, it would be a fun project to build a nice remote
| control with switches and knobs that you can program and have
| it talk to the home automation solution. To make it even more
| fun, I'm talking hard flip switches and volume like knobs,
| really tactile.
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| It's infuriating when I ask Siri to play a song and it decides
| to pick an obscure remix of the song one day, the actual song
| another day, then another remix another day.
|
| Did they test this at all? Why would you ever pick a _more_
| complex /verbose option from the results list?
| dabluecaboose wrote:
| One of the most infuriating things about _any_ voice
| assistant, IMO, is the absolute clunkiness with which you
| have to try and control music.
|
| I use Android Auto in my car for safety. God forbid I'm
| listening to a song and want to queue up another one right
| after. I don't think I've _ever_ gotten that behavior to work
| without either skipping the current song or adding the second
| song to the end of the queue. And even that 's assuming that
| it even recognized the proper song out of my library and
| didn't try to go to Youtube or something.
|
| Meanwhile, if my buddy is riding shotgun, I can just say
| "Hey, put on Peace of Mind next"
| khazhoux wrote:
| I wound up in a screaming match with my Homepod recently.
|
| "Siri, play Beethoven"
|
| <plays a Beethoven-derived hiphop track>
|
| !!!
| dxhdr wrote:
| Had the same experience at a friends house trying to get
| Alexa to play Bach. I gave up after a half dozen attempts.
|
| These products are just hilariously bad.
| cubefox wrote:
| Names are a hard problem though. How would it know how
| "Bach" is pronounced? It seems you would need pretty
| advanced multimodal AI, some sort of GPT which is trained
| both on text and audio.
| dxhdr wrote:
| That's kind of my point, it's a product that doesn't
| work. It's a language interface that can't understand
| language.
|
| FWIW I tried many alternatives like "Bach classical
| music" etc to no avail.
| khazhoux wrote:
| "Bach" is a word like any other, and unambiguous in
| English pronunciation.
| cubefox wrote:
| There is no "English" here, it's a name of a concrete
| person which has only one correct pronunciation.
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fb/De-
| Bach....
| khazhoux wrote:
| The accurate pronunciation in German is irrelevant. Siri
| is always constrained to one language (Settings > General
| > Language & Region), and when set to English you get
| English pronunciations.
|
| Same way Siri understands the english "Los Angeles" even
| though the G sound is completely different from Spanish.
|
| The english IPA for Bach is straightforward.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| GPT doesn't need to know, I told it to convert possible
| mistranscribed text to commands, "Play me some back" =>
| "Play me some Bach"
| jackvalentine wrote:
| I take your point but really like the mirth of a man who
| died 30 years before audio recordings being represented by
| a hip hop version of one of his pieces! He never recorded a
| canonical version of anything!
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| The project has been on the department trading bazaar, selling
| itself out to survive.
|
| "So we in the MacOs trading station, will push siri enable
| notifications on powerbutton wakeup, if you push the following
| answers on keywords up the likelihood.
|
| Deal? Deal!
|
| Thus she existed on, living long and prosperous.. through
| diplomatic victorys, that destroyed the qualities that could
| not keep her alive on her own..
| garbagecoder wrote:
| Apple does lay some turds. MobileMe. Whatever their attempt to
| make iTunes into a social media network was called. Maps until
| recently. Usually they fix them, but Siri never seems to get
| better.
|
| For what it's worth, I think Alexa has gotten worse, but for
| different reasons.
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _Whatever their attempt to make iTunes into a social media
| network was called._
|
| "iTunes Ping" or "Apple Music Connect".
|
| Yes, they tried it twice.
| segasaturn wrote:
| >Whatever their attempt to make iTunes into a social media
| network was called.
|
| It was called Ping for anybody wondering.
| notvplez wrote:
| I finally caved in and switched the Siri language to English on
| all my devices, after trying and failing to keep it in my
| native language on my iThings while simultaneously keeping my
| new MacBook in English (because I prefer it on computers, and I
| wanted the read time out loud at the hour-function turned on -
| it kept reading it out in a mixture of both languages, wtf?).
| Turns out it is much better in US English, but still completely
| useless .
|
| I just set timers using the crown on my watch now, combined
| with custom google assistant commands to control what I need
| (lights, tv) through my Nest. Playing and controlling music is
| too much of an extreme sport for my taste on either assistant,
| and I've stopped using it for calls too as there's always a 5%
| chance it will call up some random person I knew decades ago
| but haven't removed from my contact list because reasons. The
| name is of course totally different from the few persons I do
| call on a regular basis.
|
| It's great for joking around with my kid though, laughing at
| the misinterpretations and stuff like that. And that's about
| it.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| If you think Siri is bad, give Apple autocorrect a spin!
| rootusrootus wrote:
| We used to laugh about autocorrect mistakes, but over the
| past few years it has gotten exponentially worse. Instead of
| just screwing up the word I'm typing, it'll decide I meant a
| different phrase and change the previous word too. If you're
| not saying _exactly_ what it expects you to, it can be
| extremely frustrating.
|
| I've started turning many of the autocorrect-related features
| off entirely.
| deepspace wrote:
| Oh dear $deity. Why does it insist on capitalizing "and" in
| the middle of a sentence?
| heleninboodler wrote:
| On my phone, I've somehow gotten into a situation where I
| can't type "butt" without it autocorrecting it to "Butt".
| majormajor wrote:
| "well" and "we'll" here
| bparsons wrote:
| Outside of driving, I never really understood the popular use
| case for these voice assistants. In most situations it is easier
| to type your query rather than say it out loud.
|
| It was a novelty touted as a big leap in technology.
| johnny22 wrote:
| it's for when you can't type reasonably isn't i? Like while
| you're cooking you might say "skip to next song" or "set a
| timer for 10 minutes" or something.
|
| That's how people describe it anyways.
| throwaway_ab wrote:
| I use Siri to turn on voice control when I drive. I have voice
| control number every item on the screen.
|
| This lets me have 100% control of every feature/button and
| every app whilst I drive.
|
| I can swipe on the screen using my voice.
|
| I can write notes and messages.
|
| I can switch to any app.
|
| Voice control is a world leading accessibility feature that is
| a complete touch replacement controlled via voice.
|
| Once I no longer need voice control I turn it off via Siri. The
| entire action of turning it on, using it, turning it off occurs
| with no touch at any point.
|
| Also it's great for when I am cooking or doing diy and don't
| want to touch my phone.
|
| In comparison Siri is better at a few narrowly defined actions
| but has less than 1% of the scope of voice control.
|
| Reading people's complaints about Siri in this thread I feel
| what most people actually want is voice control.
|
| But no one outside the visually impaired community knows about
| it.
| GenerWork wrote:
| I find it odd how Apple has seemingly dropped the ball with Siri.
| Don't all newer iPhones have some sort of neural chip or
| something that could help Siri expand its capabilities? It's
| strange that Amazon is so far ahead with Alexa and Siri is
| lagging.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| "Even" implies a consensus that I don't think exists except in
| the minds of people who find hating something recreational. Siri
| works pretty fucking well in my experience, but that experience
| is colored by my understanding of what it is, and what it's good
| at.
|
| You have to be aware of what makes a good Siri question or task.
| Technical people tend to understand this implicitly; we are,
| after all, talking to a computer, and computers are notoriously
| literal and have trouble with implied contexts, etc.
|
| I think I've talked about this here before, but my wife often
| phrases questions to Siri in a way that results in the dreaded "I
| can send the results to your iPhone" non-answer. One example I
| remember happened when we were idly talking about King Charles.
| My wife asked Siri "how old is king charles" and got the non-
| answer. I asked Siri "what year was king Charles born" and got
| hard data back.
|
| It's that kind of thing.
|
| In the narrow case of music there's more to complain about, I
| guess, but the base problem is specificity and name collision. It
| doesn't seem to always pull the example of any given non-unique
| name that I might want; sometimes I wonder if what i get is just
| random.
|
| If you ask for "Take Five", you MIGHT get Dave Brubeck. I'd argue
| that, in the absence of something specific, you SHOULD get Dave
| Brubeck, and moreover you should get the album cut from "Time
| Out." But Siri doesn't really agree, for whatever reason.
|
| OTOH, if you ask Siri to play "Take Five from the Dave Brubeck
| album Time Out" you'll get exactly what you want.
|
| Siri excels in simple, discrete asks or tasks, though. We both
| routinely use it to add things to the shared shopping list we
| keep in Reminders. That's kind of awesome, and beats the old norm
| of "go find a pen to add this to the list that you may or may not
| remember to take with you when you go shopping." Setting timers
| or alarms verbally is awesome. The list goes on.
| daotoad wrote:
| I have terrible luck with Spotify and Siri. These kinds of
| specific requests fail.
|
| I tried it with your prompt and Spotify started playing the
| whole album. Which is better than my usual outcome. Of course,
| it took three tries. The first two times Siri said it was going
| to play and nothing happened.
|
| Usually I don't even get the same artist or album I ask for.
| Admittedly, I stopped trying a few months ago, so maybe they've
| improved things a bit lately, or maybe I just got lucky.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| I don't use Spotify, so I can't comment, but when I make
| those requests using Siri + Apple Music they tend to work.
| rm_-rf_slash wrote:
| > The company's senior leaders haven't shown much stomach for the
| kinds of headline-grabbing gaffes ChatGPT and similar services
| have stumbled into over the last several months.
|
| Risk aversion from immature tech is a part of Apple's DNA. It
| should be no surprise that Apple declined to push Siri beyond its
| limited capabilities.
|
| LLMs are quite new and Apple has plenty of cash to hire star devs
| to catch things up. Writing off Apple's AI future is premature.
| amelius wrote:
| You can't be apologetic about Apple by using some possible
| future scenario. Siri sucks, and just about everybody agrees.
| rm_-rf_slash wrote:
| If you are betting that Siri will be the same 10 years from
| now, I will not join you.
| amelius wrote:
| Perhaps, but who cares _now_?
| gilmore606 wrote:
| > Risk aversion from immature tech
|
| Boy, that Simpsons episode where they make fun of the Newton
| really burned them bad.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I think Siri could really benefit from some LLM goodness. It's
| just too stupid. You have to deliver every command in bite-sized
| exactly worded chunks. Really annoying. But the tech is at a
| level where it can really improve it now.
|
| It also needs some persistence. It needs to know that I never
| want to play music on my homekit. I tried deleting all the music
| from itunes but that stupid free U2 album keeps coming back and
| it often thinks I want to play music instead of doing automation
| actions.
|
| And it should be able to read my texts and tell me if something
| important comes in. Stuff like that. AI models should be able to
| deliver those things. All this manually scripted stuff is a dead
| end.
| pavedwalden wrote:
| I use Siri just for playing music, setting alarms, and reminders,
| but even there I run into bugs on a regular basis. One day she
| stopped being able to find songs from Apple Music, but could
| still play anything I'd saved to my phone (wasn't reception or
| CarPlay permissions or any of the obvious troubleshooting things
| you'd think, trust me I looked into it).
|
| Sometimes she'll also misinterpret commands for unclear reasons.
| "Tomorrow at 7am, remind me to call John" and she responds "Ok,
| I've turned on your 7am alarm". I try again, speaking more
| clearly, and she says "Your 7am alarm is already on"
| bdcravens wrote:
| Many of things I used to use Siri for I've switched to Alexa
| after putting Echoes throughout my house. It's just better.
| [deleted]
| awisema wrote:
| The claim that somehow LLMs as they stand are somehow the answer
| is disturbing. ChatGPTs ability to be authoritatively wrong is a
| serious problem...
|
| Just to see what it would do, I gave it a basic word problem the
| other day (two people drive towards each other) and it had the
| steps right, but buried in it was a simple logic error (it
| claimed that the two parties traveling at different speeds would
| travel the same distance in a unit of time).
|
| That it was good enough to seem trustworthy, made it worse...
| pbronez wrote:
| Sure, but do you need Siri to solve logic riddles? I don't. I
| need it to reliably hit other APIs and shortcuts with some
| basic arguments. Check out OpenAI's ChatGPT plugins [0]. You
| can connect the LLM system to an external service with just an
| OpenAPI model and a natural language description of what it
| does. I want that, via voice.
|
| [0] https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt-plugins
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Did you try that with ChatGPT4, or 3.5? GPT4 has gotten better
| at this type of problem, it seems.
|
| I think the point people are making is that GPT models are
| getting better at an exciting/disturbing pace depending on
| one's point of view, while Siri has been around for years and
| has only gotten worse.
| jhwhite wrote:
| I used to have Google Home and moved to Homepod Minis. I should
| have ran them side by side, but that would have gotten very
| confusing for other people in the family.
|
| Siri is fine at controlling smart home devices, giving weather,
| timers, etc...but if you ask it questions more times that not it
| wants you to use your phone. Google Home handled that so much
| better.
|
| We have Apple Music and have Homepods around the house so we use
| it for that.
| eachro wrote:
| I'd have expected speech recognition software to be good enough
| that you could have direct speech -> gpt type services. It almost
| feels like traveling to the past when asking things of Siri when
| I otherwise get very useful responses from chatgpt.
| shagie wrote:
| Speech to text is already excellent with an iDevice. Turn off
| WIFI and put it in airplane mode... then open up notes, hit the
| microphone and start some transcription.
|
| If you say "Buy a two by four" the transcription goes from
| Buy Buy a Buy a two Buy a two by
| Buy a 2 x 4
|
| "Four inches by three inches" For Four
| inches Four inches by 4" by 3 4" by 3"
|
| And that's all on device.
|
| The issue is that when going to GPT, that's going to cost
| _someone_ a few pennies each time a request is made. When that
| 's scaled up to the installed base of all Macs and iDevices
| that gets expensive fast.
| jeromeof wrote:
| I honestly don't know why Apple can't do their own ChatGPT. They
| have the money / resources to then implement something like the
| ChatGPT 'plugin' architecture so if someone wants to turn on
| their lights or get specific 'private' information that apple
| cannot give as 'training' data. i.e. callout to 'private' API's
| if appropriate to a sensible LLM generated response
| generalizations wrote:
| I'm expecting that they will - and considering the raw power of
| their local hardware, I think they have the best shot of anyone
| at cornering the AI assistant market.
|
| - private, on-device language model execution (see llama.cpp
| for feasibility)
|
| - a single, consistent AI available with you wherever you go
|
| - total access to your personal information / documents (knows
| your birthday, can see your meeting notes)
|
| Because they have the hardware to run it locally, they have
| three very hard-to-beat advantages:
|
| 1) privacy, because the LMs can see all your stuff but none of
| it goes back to apple. Microsoft can't do this; they get flak
| every time they try and phone home with telemetry, and they
| don't control their platform enough to run a massive LM in the
| background.
|
| 2) omnipresence: if you're in the apple ecosystem, you'll
| always have your iphone with you. That means the LM will have
| access to location data, maps, chat - everything. And since it
| never leaves the phone, privacy-oriented people may be ok with
| it. And that means the LM can be exponentially more useful than
| just summarizing documents.
|
| 3) evaluation costs - they are the only competitor who will not
| have to pay for a massive datacenter, which means that the LMs
| can be as powerful as the M2+ hardware they sell. Everyone else
| will have no alternative to running the LMs on their
| centralized, expensive hardware.
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