[HN Gopher] Apple previews Live Speech, Personal Voice, and more...
___________________________________________________________________
Apple previews Live Speech, Personal Voice, and more new
accessibility features
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 557 points
Date : 2023-05-16 12:07 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.apple.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.apple.com)
| nerdjon wrote:
| I find it interesting that they are not waiting to talk about
| this at WWDC since I assume these features are tied to iOS 17. I
| wonder if that means that the simplified apps won't be available
| to developers (I don't see an App Store so I guess that makes
| sense).
|
| All of these features do seem really awesome for those that need
| it. Particularly the voice synthesis. I honestly just want to
| play with that myself and see how good it is and I am curious if
| they would use that tech for other things as well.
|
| The whole new simple UI I can really see being a major point.
| Especially if it includes an Apple Watch component and can still
| be synced with one for the safety features a watch has.
| Particularly fall detection.
|
| Edit:
|
| Maybe I missed it but this brings up an interesting problem. Is
| the Voice Synthesis only stored on the device and never backed up
| or synced to a new device. Can you imagine your phone breaking or
| you needing to upgrade after you lost your voice (but you had
| previously set that up) and you can no longer use it?!?
|
| I fully understand the privacy concerns of something like this
| being lost. But this isn't like FaceID that could just be easily
| re-created in some situations. So I really hope they thought
| about that.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Apple has a way to encrypt sensitive data locally and store to
| iCloud, then de-encrypt it locally later. They are kind of hit-
| and-miss with when they do this. But they certainly can do it,
| so it should be possible to securely back up a voice profile.
|
| FaceID is not backed up to iCloud. That is in part because it
| is a local-only feature. And it is in part because people's
| faces change over time, so requiring them to re-enroll their
| face with each new phone ensures accuracy over time.
|
| It may also be sensor-dependent; the model produced and stored
| by an iPhone 14 might not "make sense" to an iPhone 16, if the
| hardware is different.
| nerdjon wrote:
| True, but they have made choices of where they will and will
| not do this in the past.
|
| I can see the privacy reasons not to have this data sync, but
| given the reasons you would be doing it in the first place
| the risk of loosing those recordings or the data for the
| voice would be a huge risk.
|
| I don't doubt that Apple could sync this data, I just hope
| that they are. I don't see anything about that happening on
| this document so I worry that they won't for privacy
| concerns.
| extra88 wrote:
| > I find it interesting that they are not waiting to talk about
| this at WWDC
|
| May 18 is Global Accessibility Awareness Day. There will be
| many accessibility-related announcements this week.
|
| https://accessibility.day/
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| This is a pattern they have gotten into in the last few years.
| Announce accessibility features a few weeks before WWDC. I
| think it's so they don't have to spend time on important
| features for the target demographic knowing that they will get
| swamped out by all the major OS features in the news cycle.
| dagmx wrote:
| they do this every year. It's because accessibility awareness
| day is later this week.
| samwillis wrote:
| If they didn't save Personal Voice for WWDC, just think what
| they may have ready to announce there. On its own Personal
| Voice would have been a headline grabbing announcement, but
| they dropped it now. That suggests to me exciting things.
| nerdjon wrote:
| I have been starting to wonder if this really is going to be
| a very packed WWDC. Between this announcement and the Final
| Cut Pro (and the other tool I don't remember now)
| announcement.
| specialist wrote:
| This announcement links to demo reels of actual users. More of
| this, please.
|
| I wish Apple would produce Starfire style demos showing off their
| products. In context narratives showing how real people use
| stuff. Covering features old and new.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfire_video_prototype
|
| I so want the voice interface future. I became addicted to
| audiobooks and podcasts during the apocalypse. Hours and days
| outside, walking the dogs, hiking, gardening.
|
| I made multiple attempts to adapt to Siri and Voice Activated
| input. Hot damn, that stuff pissed me off. Repeatedly. So I'd
| have to stop, take off gloves, fish out the phone, unfsck myself,
| reassemble, then resume my task. Again and again.
|
| How very modal.
|
| This mobile wearable stuff is supposed to be seamless,
| effortless. Not demand my full attention with every little
| hiccup.
|
| So I just gave up. Now I suffer with the touch UI. And
| aggrevations like recording a long video of my pocket lint and
| invoking emergency services.
|
| Maybe I should just get a Walkman. Transfer content to cassette
| tapes.
| oidar wrote:
| Apple's assistive and accessibility features (on mobile) has
| always been way ahead of Android's - but this taking it to the
| next level. Talk about a moat.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| Android has on-device speech to text for what is happening
| around you and what is going on in phone calls built-in, which
| iOS still cannot do, and allows third party accessibility
| services. Apple remains far, far behind.
|
| For example, iOS's newly announced Detection Mode features have
| been available since Android _6_.
| https://support.google.com/accessibility/android/answer/9031...
|
| iOS still doesn't have anything like Direct My Call, which is
| so useful that I use it as an unimpaired person.
| https://guidebooks.google.com/pixel/optimize-your-life/use-d...
|
| In general, just like with applications that aren't for
| accessibility, it is better to use a platform that lets you
| customize the system to fit your specific needs. We, as
| technologists, should understand this better than most. iOS
| simply fails here.
| robertoandred wrote:
| An app working with Android 6 does not mean it's been
| available since Android 6. That app was released in 2019.
| nerdjon wrote:
| I understand where you are going with this.
|
| But "We, as technologists" need to understand that that
| customization is a hard thing for many people. Most people,
| especially the people that part of what is announced today is
| targeted at, need something that is baked into the operating
| system and easier to manage.
|
| If an accessibility feature requires someone to get the help
| of someone else to setup it is already a failure right out
| the gate. They are still reliant on someone else to help
| manage their phone.
|
| Now yes there are situations where this is impossible to
| avoid, particularly for vision impaired people since you need
| to first set that up (but even that there are attempts to
| address this by the phone setup having those systems turned
| on by default).
|
| But those are the exceptions and should not be the rule for
| accessibility features.
|
| Edit:
|
| Just to be clear there is obviously a market for highly
| customizable accessibility tools similar to the Xbox Adaptive
| Controller which would need someone else's assistance with.
|
| But not everyone needs this level of support and where
| possible we should be making tools that allow someone to be
| fully self reliant and not rely on someone else for setup.
| hassancf wrote:
| Summary:
|
| "Apple has announced new accessibility features for its devices,
| including Live Speech, Personal Voice, and Point and Speak in
| Magnifier. These updates will be available later this year and
| will help people with cognitive, vision, hearing, and mobility
| disabilities. Live Speech will read aloud text on the screen,
| while Personal Voice will allow users to create a custom voice
| for their device. Point and Speak in Magnifier will provide a
| spoken description of what is being pointed at. These new
| features are part of Apple's ongoing commitment to making its
| products accessible to everyone."
|
| By Bard in 100 words
| nixpulvis wrote:
| I guess I'm happy about this... but I find it kinda sad too.
| Apple used to be the minimalist, clean, and champions of the "it
| just works". Now so many people are getting lost in the gestures,
| repaint/caching, warring apps and incompatible standards, that
| this pairing down is increasingly necessary.
|
| It strikes me as something of a halfway point to a phone version
| of CarPlay. A safety feature that needs immediate investment. Car
| focus is overly prescriptive, and focus in general doesn't make
| my phone really safe in the car. And DO NOT start with me about
| Siri.
|
| I could rant forever, so don't let that take away from the meat
| of this announcement.
| apozem wrote:
| Personal Voice is remarkable. Millions of people will be able to
| create a synthetic voice to help themselves communicate.
|
| We live in the sci-fi future we always dreamed of. Sure, it's a
| dystopian future, what technology.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| What, exactly, is dystopian about an on-device generated voice?
|
| This is about as non-dystopian of an implementation as you can
| get.
| marban wrote:
| SPJ would be proud.
| abledon wrote:
| Finally! Such a simple idea thats taken so long. My parents &
| grandparents are going to LOVE this.
|
| Only thing they need now is a simplified user interface for Apple
| Podcasts, 1 click button to listen to the latest episode of a
| certain podcast on there
| efields wrote:
| Love the timing of this.
|
| "AI is gonna destroy jobs" vs. "Secure on-device AI can improve
| your quality of life."
|
| Narratives matter.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Marketing matters. Apple's "narrative" is breaking their
| "privacy is a human right" motto so they can kowtow to China
| and keep their manufacturing margins. That's not very
| reassuring to people who want truly private AI hardware, but
| Apple can fix that with marketing.
|
| If you trust them to provide a secure model, I'd wager you
| haven't fully explored the world of iCloud exploitation.
| efields wrote:
| I trust them more than I should but less than I could.
|
| In theory researches and hackers can and do watch network
| traffic while training an on-device model. Apple doesn't want
| their position of "on device AI is better for the consumer"
| to be tarnished, so I trust them to not screw around with
| this.
| precompute wrote:
| I, for one, don't want a voice cloner in every hand. These
| things are very, very destructive. Obviously, this is a post
| about a new apple feature (even though great voice cloning has
| existed for months) so all the fanboys are unable to control
| their enthusiasm.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Several comments expressing delight at the personal voice thing,
| I think it sounds completely creepy.
| frankus wrote:
| I've been digging into Apple's (existing) accessibility features
| last week and it made me think about what (for lack of a better
| term) an "accessibility first" app architecture might look like.
| Current app UIs are all about how to visually represent the
| objects you can interact with and the actions you can take on
| them, and then accessibility features are layered on top.
| (Warning: half-baked idea that's probably been tried countless
| times) what if you started with semantic information about the
| objects and the actions you can take on them and then the GUI is
| just one of several interaction modes (along with voice,
| keyboard, CLI, etc)?
| w10-1 wrote:
| Obviously developers who design semantically for different UIs
| would be far, far ahead. And Apple API's can be used there.
|
| The harder problem is building accessibility API's for
| oblivious developers, so they can retrofit at the last minute
| before release (as usually happens). Apple's done a pretty good
| job there, harvesting the semantics of existing visual UI's to
| adapt for voice/hearing.
| jdlshore wrote:
| This was the original premise of the Smalltalk Model-View-
| Controller architecture. (Not to be confused with web MVC,
| which reused the name for something else.) The "Controller" in
| Model-View-Controller refers to the input device, and a given
| Model can have multiple independent Views and Controllers. The
| "Model" is supposed to an object that's a semantic
| representation of the underlying thing being manipulated.
|
| One of the visible impacts of MVC is that changes occur in
| real-time: you modify a value in a dialog, and everything
| affected by that value instantly updates. This is already
| common in Mac apps (in contrast to Windows apps, which
| typically want you to press "ok" or "apply"), so it wouldn't
| surprise me if Apple was already using a modern MVC variant.
| It's a well-known pattern.
| alexjm wrote:
| In the Apple documentation for MVC, "controller" refers to a
| class that sits between the model and view. When data changes
| in the model, it updates the view; and when the user
| interacts with the view, it passes events to the model.
|
| https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ge.
| ..
|
| Elsewhere, the documentation contrasts the Cocoa and
| Smalltalk versions of MVC where all three pieces communicate
| directly:
|
| https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co.
| ..
|
| Like you said, this separation means you can "drive" the same
| model through different UIs. That's one of the things I
| always thought was cool about AppleScript support -- the app
| exposes a different interface to the same model.
| robin_reala wrote:
| The Personal Voice feature is making me tear up. Pretty much the
| most human use of AI I've seen so far.
| nohaydeprobleme wrote:
| For ease of reading for other users, here is a quote from the
| article about the Personal Voice feature:
|
| "For users at risk of losing their ability to speak -- such as
| those with a recent diagnosis of ALS (amyotrophic lateral
| sclerosis) or other conditions that can progressively impact
| speaking ability -- Personal Voice is a simple and secure way
| to create a voice that sounds like them.
|
| "Users can create a Personal Voice by reading along with a
| randomized set of text prompts to record 15 minutes of audio on
| iPhone or iPad. This speech accessibility feature uses on-
| device machine learning to keep users' information private and
| secure, and integrates seamlessly with Live Speech so users can
| speak with their Personal Voice when connecting with loved
| ones.
|
| "At the end of the day, the most important thing is being able
| to communicate with friends and family," said Philip Green,
| board member and ALS advocate at the Team Gleason nonprofit,
| who has experienced significant changes to his voice since
| receiving his ALS diagnosis in 2018. "If you can tell them you
| love them, in a voice that sounds like you, it makes all the
| difference in the world -- and being able to create your
| synthetic voice on your iPhone in just 15 minutes is
| extraordinary."
| sork_hn wrote:
| I wonder if I could use this to build a AI voice for my aging
| parents so I can hear their voices after they pass away?
| garblegarble wrote:
| You could also just record some conversations with them? I
| think hearing them actually speak about their experiences
| and memories would be much more impactful than hearing a
| simulation of them, no matter how accurate
| heywhatupboys wrote:
| Do the diseased get to loose their voice when they are gone?
| sswezey wrote:
| Honestly, I wish this was around 10 years ago to save my late
| mother's voice. I saved all my voicemails I have from her and
| wish I could hear more from her.
| easton wrote:
| Finally! Grandma mode! With how hard it is to find uncomplicated
| dumbphones that work on AT&T, this will be an alternative for if
| we need to get my grandma another phone.
| KyeRussell wrote:
| My first thought was "I'm totally going to turn this on on an
| off day".
| ChicagoBoy11 wrote:
| this was my first thought as well. I could immediately see how
| this would totally allow my grandmother to be independent while
| using a smartphone!
| knaik94 wrote:
| One of the most useful accessibility features, as someone who
| doesn't require any, has been the live caption feature. I have no
| hearing or vision impairments, but I do struggle with ADHD. It
| was launched a while ago, along with audio detection for things
| like doorbells or alarms. I was hoping multi-language
| translations to be announced along with this. Currently things
| are still limited to English (U.S.) or (Canada) audio and text.
|
| It's been so helpful to be able to read a short transcript of
| what was just said. The live caption feature works on video
| calls, and while multi-speaker captioning isn't perfect, it
| mostly works. I also really like how Android, iOS, and Windows
| all seem to keep feature parity among the operating systems. I
| wonder how Google and Microsoft will respond to this and I wonder
| how Personal Voice will work for communication outside of the
| Apple ecosystem.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| Frankly, I think Assistive Access could be great for a lot of
| boomer parents/grandparents. My dad is unwilling to learn how to
| use a smartphone and this could be sufficiently approachable to
| let him overcome his fear of it.
| sergiomattei wrote:
| Assistive Access looks great! This is perfect for my grandfather
| with Parkinson's, who often struggles with his phone due to the
| deterioration of his motor skills.
| alden5 wrote:
| Same thought here! it really sucks that 3g networks shut down
| making most flip phones functionality useless. there really
| aren't any modern smart phones designed for people who want
| something easy to use which makes this announcement so exciting
| nitins_jakta wrote:
| Great stuff. Next, would love to see Apple give an option for
| people sensitive to temporal dithering or PWM.
|
| It triggers migraines (or vestibular migraines), tension
| headaches and dizziness in a minority.
|
| See https://www.change.org/p/apple-add-accessibility-options-
| to-..., or FlickerSense.org, or LEDStrain.org forum.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| I had two relatives die from ALS.
|
| When my grandfather lost his ability to speak, it was frustrating
| for him because he was such an intelligent, articulate person.
| Having a disease that renders your voice useless and then having
| to communicate via a small whiteboard for him was not fun. He
| couldn't write fast enough and often times felt like a burden
| because we would all be waiting to see what he wanted to say.
|
| the Live Speech features for people with ALS will be a game
| changer. It saddens me this wasn't around when my grandfather
| passed, but am optimistic others who have this horrendous disease
| can utilize it to continue to communicate with their families
| even when ALS has taken their voice.
| bigdict wrote:
| "Assistive Access distills experiences across the Camera, Photos,
| Music, Calls, and Messages apps on iPhone to their essential
| features in order to lighten their cognitive load for users."
|
| I might use this myself even though I'm not disabled.
| matwood wrote:
| Accessibility is for everyone.
| sparsevector wrote:
| Agreed. Presenting this feature solely as a tool for users with
| cognitive disabilities might undersell its potential. There's a
| significant number of smartphone users who only utilize a small
| fraction of the available features and would prefer a simpler
| interface focusing on the 10% of features they actually use.
| Interestingly, this demographic includes both less tech-
| literate users, who might feel overwhelmed by the complexity,
| and extremely tech-literate users who know exactly what they
| need and prefer clean, distraction-free tools.
| Corrado wrote:
| My 84 year old mother does remarkably well with her suite of
| Apple products. However, it would be nice to simplify some
| things. She only calls or chats with a limited number of
| people. Reworking the phone and messenger apps to use large
| pictures of the people would be a benefit. Something similar
| for the camera / photos app would be great as well.
| dfinninger wrote:
| You can pin messages in iMessage, which turns it into a big
| photo. Also when you hit the search button in Photos it'll
| show you big images of people's faces if you want to see
| photos of a particular person (if you've trained your phone
| on those faces).
|
| I do wish the "favorites" view in the phone app made the
| headshots big like iMessage, though.
| xattt wrote:
| > I might use this myself even though I'm not disabled.
|
| Also see curb cuts (1)
|
| (1) https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/curb-cuts/
| teddyh wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Curb_cut_effect&o.
| ..
| pimlottc wrote:
| Not all disabilities are permanent! Sometimes you're just
| situationally disabled, i.e. you're in the car, or carrying a
| child, or sleep-deprived, or just stressed out.
|
| Accessibility features can help everyone.
| KyeRussell wrote:
| Time to rethink your understanding of disability.
| achalkley wrote:
| Great preparation for Reality Pro
| jalada wrote:
| I know there's a lot of concerns about generative voices, but
| it's a shame the only solution is 'insist on a live recording of
| random phrases'. For those whose voices have already degenerated,
| but who have hours of recordings available from historical
| sources (e.g. speech therapy sessions), it's too late to ask them
| to record something fresh.
|
| Don't get me wrong, it's fantastic to see the tech being used
| this way. My Dad has lost most of his speech due to some kind of
| aphasia-causing condition and if this had been available just a
| year or two ago it could've been a big help for him; it's
| reassuring that others earlier in the journey will benefit from
| this.
| desro wrote:
| You may want to check out Rhasspy/Piper [0,1]. The Piper page
| includes training instructions.
|
| [0] https://github.com/rhasspy
|
| [1] https://github.com/rhasspy/piper
| elicash wrote:
| It's not necessarily the only solution, just the one Apple has
| started with. My guess is that at least in part there are
| technical reasons, since even this structured approach will
| require overnight processing (source: WaPo) by Apple.
|
| I do think additionally, in the case for a situation like with
| your dad, Apple would need to verify that he is the same person
| that there's hours of audio of. That strikes me as a difficult
| at Apple's scale.
| nier wrote:
| Archive link for mentioned Washington Post article:
| https://archive.is/CPk7H
| nntwozz wrote:
| Apple accessibility features are second to none. They have been
| leading the charge ever since Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah 22 years ago.
| victor106 wrote:
| Apple gets lot of flak here in HN. But these features are really
| commendable.
|
| The personal voice feature is one of the best uses of AI I have
| read about in recent times.
|
| Kudos to Apple!!!
| johnwayne666 wrote:
| > Users who are sensitive to rapid animations can automatically
| pause images with moving elements, such as GIFs, in Messages and
| Safari.
|
| That's so nice. I hate when stuff moves in my vision when I'm
| trying to read something.
| kasperset wrote:
| Always nice to see accessibility features. I would love to see a
| way to share settings. There are so many hidden features and iOS
| settings is getting crowded and is very difficult to use. A
| "simplified" mode where only few selected apps are available like
| they have shown in the press release would be nice even for not
| so challenged people.
| billiam wrote:
| Not sure why everyone thinks local language processing,
| generation and voice synthesis has anything to do with privacy.
| Apple's business model has supported their relatively pro-privacy
| approach (along with how bad they are at a lot of cloud services)
| but doing anything useful with a 30B token LLM stored on your
| machine is still going to require the Internet, and your AI
| Personal Assistant will be just as tracked and cracked as you are
| today.
| cglong wrote:
| Off-topic, but I'm getting tired of Apple creating a Proper Noun
| for every new feature they want to include in marketing. They're
| always so vague and/or obtuse that I keep forgetting them and
| what they mean. As an example, I thought I knew what ProMotion
| was but am realizing now that I was confusing it with True Tone.
| heywhatupboys wrote:
| point of Apple products is that users don't have to care
| russellbeattie wrote:
| If you haven't looked at the accessibility features on your
| iPhone, you should check them out. There's some interesting stuff
| there already. Though it's a little awkward to use, the facial
| gesture functionality is really interesting.
|
| I feel that many features currently focused on accessibility will
| soon be integrated into the main user interface as AI becomes a
| more important part of our computing experience. Talking to your
| phone without a wake word, hand gestures, object
| recognition/detection, face and head movements, etc. are all part
| of the future HCI. Live multimodal input will be the norm within
| the decade.
|
| It's taken a while for people to get used to having a live mic
| waiting for wakewords, and it'll take them a while to get used to
| a live camera (though this is already happening with Face ID),
| but sooner than later, having a HAL 9000 style camera in our
| lives will be the norm.
| zackkatz wrote:
| a) These features are truly moving. I didn't expect to get
| emotional from a press release. b) It's gonna be a bonkers
| keynote if they're releasing this before WWDC.
| zakki wrote:
| I'm exited to try Personal Voice feature. If it happened years
| ago I could create the voice of my parents, grand parents and
| other close people to me. It will be wonderful to hear their
| voice again. Hmm I wonder if we can extract a voice from a video
| and feed it to Personal Voice.
| sergiomattei wrote:
| Omg! I must do this now with my grandma
| ciabattabread wrote:
| > Assistive Access includes a customized experience for Phone and
| FaceTime, _which have been combined into a single Calls app_
|
| Hmm... telegraphing a future change?
| pcurve wrote:
| I'm in my mid 40s, and I can see myself using these because I can
| no longer read things clearly without reading glasses, including
| restaurant menus.
|
| And yay to the super tacky looking deep drop shadows and rounded
| corners. Hate them all you want, but they're good for affordance.
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| Is it digitally watermarked so that I know I'm listening to an AI
| version of someone's voice?
|
| If not, why did Apple think I would not want to know that bit of
| information.
| classified wrote:
| I'd like to see text-to-speech applicable to iBooks so you can
| have whole chapters read to you. Not as good as an audio book,
| but better than nothing.
| robin_reala wrote:
| So I agree that easily available speech controls would be a
| nice benefit, but Books is fully compatible with VoiceOver
| already (and has been since VoiceOver's launch).
| layer8 wrote:
| This is problematic because it competes with audiobooks.
| Presumably Apple wants to sell audiobooks and also doesn't want
| to piss off publishers. Kindle provides a (mediocre) text-to-
| speech feature, but only for books where publisher have
| consented to it. Apple's strategy seems to be to have
| publishers (rather than readers) use their AI-powered digital
| narration service:
| https://authors.apple.com/support/4519-digital-narration-aud...
| andy_xor_andrew wrote:
| Apple really is the sleeping giant on AI.
|
| It would be totally within their MO to suddenly wake up, and turn
| this cutting edge AI stuff, which no one is quite sure what to do
| with, into a killer app with super high quality. Fingers crossed.
| santiagobasulto wrote:
| Off-topic: when you work with multiple monitors, wouldn't you
| like some sort of eye-tracking mechanism that could identify what
| window you're looking at, and immediately shift the focus to
| that?
|
| I have several consoles open in different monitors and sometimes
| I accidentally run commands in some because the focus is in some
| other one :/
| crims0n wrote:
| How would that work when you just want to glance at another
| window but not bring it into focus?
| felipemesquita wrote:
| The main issue I see older people have with iPhones is unrelated
| to ui complexity. iOS' worst parts are services/updates where the
| user is frequently asked for Apple ID passwords and shown
| confusing ads for Apple services like iCloud Photo Library that
| end up making photos more complicated to use as some pictures are
| now unavailable without internet. More parts of the iOS
| experience are getting unnecessarily tangled with server side
| services that require unpredictable prompts to get acceptance to
| terms and conditions, logins, and traps that make you set up two
| factor auth or buy an unnecessary subscription.
| qgin wrote:
| These things are the bane of my existence with my Mom's iphone.
| She is blind but is not able to use all the swiping/tapping
| features of Voiceover due to a tremor. She mostly uses the
| phone with Siri only and that works well enough until a popup
| decides to appear.
| ec109685 wrote:
| I agree that apple prompts for iCloud passwords way too
| frequently and doesn't have the ability to authorize with
| another device (despite the fact that you could reset your
| password from another device).
|
| "Type your password to buy this item on the App Store". Why?
| falcolas wrote:
| > "Type your password to buy this item on the App Store".
| Why?
|
| Because store items can be quite expensive (particularly the
| microtransactions), and it's using a stored credit card. I
| too get bugged by the plethora of prompts, but this is a good
| example of when to use one. Plus, after doing it once you can
| tie it back to Face ID or Touch ID and not have to enter it
| again for quite some time.
| ec109685 wrote:
| Store items have much, much less value than your personal
| data on the device and that can be accessed just with your
| passcode.
| falcolas wrote:
| Financial transactions are held to a higher standard
| (i.e. there's a bunch of laws around them) than device
| access. That said, you can make your device passcode as
| complex as your Apple ID password if it's a tradeoff
| you're willing to make.
| rado wrote:
| This is great, though they should really fix accessibility
| basics: keyboard control in App Store etc. I contacted Apple
| Support about keyboard control of the Look Around feature in
| Maps, not sure they even understood the request. Directed me to
| an unsolicited ideas disclaimer.
| samwillis wrote:
| Firstly compliments to Apple for all these incredible
| accessibility features.
|
| I think there is an important little nod to the future in this
| announcement. "Personal Voice" is training (likely fine tuning)
| and then running a local AI model to generate the user's voice.
| This is a sneak peak of the future of Apple.
|
| They are in the unique position to enable _local_ AI tools, such
| as assistance or text generation, without the difficulties and
| privacy concerns with the cloud. Apple silicone is primed for
| local AI models with its GPU, Neural Cores and the unified memory
| architecture.
|
| I suspect that Apple is about to surprise everyone with what they
| do next. I'm very excited to see where they go with the M3, and
| what they release for both users and developers looking to
| harness the progress made in AI but locally.
| ec109685 wrote:
| The question is whether there will be models that can't fit
| into an iPhone that apple will miss out on because they find
| cloud based personalization so abhorrent.
|
| Agree these are tremendously good features and having them run
| locally will provide the best possible experience.
| samwillis wrote:
| My hope for the surprise is an almost order of magnitude
| increase in memory on these chips. That wold be
| transformative for local AI.
| fastball wrote:
| Order of magnitude increase in memory without a
| corresponding increase in size is a pipe dream if I've ever
| heard one.
| samwillis wrote:
| We're all aloud our pipe dreams, the future is built on
| them.
| astrange wrote:
| Have you tried using less memory?
| reaperducer wrote:
| _The question is whether there will be models that can't fit
| into an iPhone that apple will miss out on_
|
| Fortunately, Apple isn't an adolescent, so it doesn't suffer
| from FOMO.
|
| _because they find cloud based personalization so
| abhorrent._
|
| I'm not even sure what "cloud based personalization" means to
| the user, other than "Hoover up all of your personal
| information."
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > I'm not even sure what "cloud based personalization"
| means to the user, other than "Hoover up all of your
| personal information."
|
| It means having actually good ML.
|
| I see so many posts around here saying Apple is absolutely
| well positioned to dominate in ML. It's just not true.
|
| Nobody who is a top AI player wants to work at Apple where
| they have few if any AI products, no data, don't pay
| particularly well, not a big research culture, etc. etc.
|
| The _only_ thing they have going for them in this space is
| a good ARM architecture for low power matrix
| multiplication.
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| Do users actually care whether something is local or not?
|
| (Edit: In terms of privacy as there are benefits in terms of
| speed and offline work)
|
| It's not like we're not already storing all of our media on the
| cloud (including voice), passwords and other sensitive data.
| s3p wrote:
| No, it is not. We are not ALL doing this, maybe you are
| though.
| drewbeck wrote:
| Local also solves any spotty connection issues. Your super
| amazing know everything about you assistant that stops
| working when you're on a plane or subway or driving through
| the mountains is very less amazing. If they can solve it,
| local will end up being way way smoother of a daily
| experience.
| deanc wrote:
| Yes. The amount of times I ask Siri on my homepod "What time
| is it?" and it replies "One moment..." [5 seconds] "Sorry,
| this is taking longer than expected..." [5 seconds] "Sorry, I
| didn't get that".
|
| I have to assume this is due to connectivity issues, there is
| no other logical reason why it would take so long to figure
| out what I said for so long, or not have the data on what the
| time is locally.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| It's shipping the recording to get recognized, interpreted,
| and mapped to commands.
| ambicapter wrote:
| Apple has positioned itself as big on privacy, turning
| privacy into a premium product (because no other big tech
| company has taken that stance or seems willing to), further
| entrenching Apple as the premium option. In that respect I
| think users will "care" about privacy.
| heyjamesknight wrote:
| I do, when I'm without a quality internet connection and a
| basic request to Siri to turn on a timer fails.
| criddell wrote:
| A lot of end users do not and they have no interest in
| spending the time figuring it out. That's why it's very
| important that the companies behind the technology we use
| make ethical choices that are good for their users and when
| that doesn't happen, legislators need to step in.
|
| Apple has been on both sides of that coin and what is ethical
| isn't always clear.
| fastball wrote:
| > companies need to be ethical
|
| > what is ethical isn't always clear
|
| So...?
| criddell wrote:
| So communicate. Have guiding principles for the company.
| Be open about the choices you make and why you make them.
| Listen and respond to criticism.
| otterley wrote:
| Apple has one: "Privacy is a fundamental human right."
| LocalH wrote:
| Not for their employees, otherwise they'd develop a setup
| to keep personal and company information separate
| internally. https://www.theverge.com/22648265/apple-
| employee-privacy-icl...
| wstrange wrote:
| Except when it impacts profits (I E. China)
| crazygringo wrote:
| Absolutely, in terms of speed.
|
| Even with something as simple as dictation, when iOS did it
| over the cloud, it was limited to 30 seconds at a time, and
| could have very noticeable lag.
|
| Now that dictation is on-device, there's no time limit (you
| can dictate continuously) and it's very responsive. Instead
| of dictating short messages, you can dictate an entire
| journal entry.
|
| Obviously it will vary on a feature-by-feature basis whether
| on-device is even possible or beneficial, but for anything
| you want to do in "real time" it's very much ideal to do
| locally.
|
| Edit in response to your edit: nope, on privacy specifically
| I don't think most users care at all. I think it's all about
| speed and the existence of features in the first place.
| hosteur wrote:
| Yes. I am a user. And I care.
|
| I think most users care if actually given the choice.
| j2bax wrote:
| Agreed, which is why Facebook was so devastated by opt in
| tracking...
| Someone wrote:
| > Do users actually care whether something is local or not?
|
| I think most don't, but they do care about latency, and
| that's lower for local hardware.
|
| Of course, it's also higher for slower hardware, and mobile
| local hardware has a speed disadvantage, but even on a modern
| phone, local can beat in the cloud for latency.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Yes
| xnx wrote:
| > They are in the unique position to enable local AI tools
|
| Nothing special about Apple with regards to AI. M2 beats x86 in
| power efficiency, but not significantly better than other ARM
| processors.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| I think the parent is referring to the Apple Neural Engine in
| Apple Silicon, which aren't widely used today (as far as I
| know)
| jayd16 wrote:
| Is it really that unique a position? Doesn't Google's pixel
| phones have a neural core and similar architecture as well?
| crazygringo wrote:
| A lot of people buy Android. But very few people buy Pixel:
|
| > _In a world dominated by iPhones and Samsung phones, Google
| isn 't a contender. Since the first Pixel launched in 2016,
| the entire series has sold 27.6 million units, according to
| data by analyst firm IDC -- a number that's one-tenth of the
| 272 million phones Samsung shipped in 2021 alone. Apple's no
| slouch, having shipped 235 million phones in the same
| period._ [1]
|
| [1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/why-google-pixels-arent-
| as-...
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| How is this at all an answer to @jayd16's question?
|
| The number of phones Google has sold is completely
| irrelevant to the fact that they too do local ai and have
| hardware on device for processing it.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Because jayd16 was responding to samwillis's comment
| about Apple being in a unique position.
|
| Part of that unique position is already being a popular
| product. Google adding a bunch of local ML features isn't
| going to move the needle for Google if people aren't
| buying Pixels in the first place for reasons that have
| nothing to do with ML.
|
| If Google's trying to roll out local ML features but 90%
| of Android phones can't support them, it's not benefiting
| Google that much. Hence, Apple's unique position to
| benefit in a way that Google won't.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _number of phones Google has sold is completely
| irrelevant to the fact that they too do local ai_
|
| How will they make money? For Apple, device purchases
| make local processing worth it. For Google, who
| distribute software to varied hardware, subscription is
| the only way. For reasons from updating to piracy,
| subscription software tends to be SaaS.
| barkerja wrote:
| Does Google do on-device processing? Or do they have to
| pander to the lowest denominator, which happens to be
| their biggest marketshare?
|
| If the answer is no, then does it make sense for them to
| allocate those resources for such a small segment, and
| potentially alienate its users that choose non-Pixel
| devices?
|
| Also, if the answer is no, this is where Apple would have
| the upper-hand, given that ALL iOS devices run on
| hardware created by Apple, giving some guarantees.
|
| (I don't know this answer, it's a legitimate ask)
| pier25 wrote:
| > _But very few people buy Pixel_
|
| I've wanted to buy a Pixel for years but Google doesn't
| distribute it here. It's not like I'm living in some remote
| area, I live in Mexico, right next door.
|
| The first couple of years I assumed Google was just testing
| the waters, but after so many Pixel models I suspect it's
| really just more of a marketing thing for Android. They
| don't seem to have any interest in distributing the Pixel
| worldwide, ramping up production, etc.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Pixel is just an example of Google owning the stack end to
| end but the Qualcomm chips in the Samsung phones have
| Tensor accelerator hardware and all mobile hardware is
| shared memory. I think samwillis was referring to the
| uniqueness of their PC hardware and my comment was that
| they're simply using the very common mobile architecture in
| their PCs instead of being in a completely unique place.
| Grustaf wrote:
| The uniqueness is not in hardware it's in trust. And the
| ability to make software for normal human beings.
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| Trust. That's an interesting word.
|
| Personally, I don't trust corporations. Their motive is
| always money.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Personally, I don 't trust corporations._
|
| How do you eat?
| nawgz wrote:
| Because a food corporation that sells food that kills
| people is unlikely to make piles of money.
| paganel wrote:
| Not for lack of trying.
|
| If anyone were to write a chronological history of
| regulations imposed by different authorities throughoug
| history I think that it is a fair assumption to make that
| regulations related to making bread would already show up
| in the first chapters of the book.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I don't trust Apple to make usable/working ML products,
| whereas I do trust Google to do those things.
|
| I would never, for instance, rely on Apple's "Translate"
| when Google is available.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Apple's maps, navigation, and routing are also inferior
| to Google's
| sbuk wrote:
| Depend on where you are. In my experience, Google's times
| are way too optimistic and the route finding in London is
| shit.
| asveikau wrote:
| Sounds more like fanboyism to me.
| [deleted]
| birdyrooster wrote:
| Google has the absolute worst ARM silicon money can buy
| (Tensor G2), go look at the benchmarks it's comical they
| would charge $1800 for a phone with it.
| Grazester wrote:
| Comical or not it gets the job done and I think this was
| the idea.
| uncletammy wrote:
| > They are in the unique position to enable local AI tools,
| such as assistance or text generation, without the difficulties
| and privacy concerns with the cloud.
|
| I don't see why client-side processing mitigates the privacy
| concerns. That doesn't stop Apple from "locally" spying on you
| then later sending that data to their servers.
| marricks wrote:
| Ok, sure, but surely you see how it is that much harder to
| do?
|
| Also since Apple is built around selling expensive devices
| and services you could also see why they'd have much less
| incentive to spy and collect data than, say, Google or
| Facebook?
|
| The cynicism of "everything is equally bad so why care" is
| destructive.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Now. It was just two decades ago that Apple was on life
| support. That could happen again. And the temptation would
| be much stronger to start monitizing their user's data.
| marricks wrote:
| Very good point: if things changed drastically they could
| change drastically.
| aardvarkr wrote:
| Nope but that is something that can be monitored and
| investigated, pretty easily I might add.
| huijzer wrote:
| Sounds plausible. Also due to the news yesterday that Apple
| uses 90% of TSMC's 3nm space in 2023 [1]. Whereas everyone is
| talking about a recession, Apple seems to see opportunities. Or
| maybe they just had too much cash on hand. Also possible.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35947339
| thorncorona wrote:
| I thought this is because everyone else is interested in N3E
| while Apple is happy to book on N3B?
| smoldesu wrote:
| Density doesn't _always_ matter. I 'm reminded of Apple's 5nm
| M1 Ultra struggling to keep up with Nvidia's 10nm RTX 3080 in
| standard use. Having such a minor node advantage won't
| necessarily save them here, especially since Nvidia's
| currently occupying the TSMC 4nm supply.
| IOT_Apprentice wrote:
| Apple is rumored to be taking 90% of TSMCs 3nm production.
| smoldesu wrote:
| It will be quite the showdown, then. The M1 struggled to
| compete with current-gen Nvidia cards at release, we'll
| have to see if the same holds true for M3.
| Someone wrote:
| > Having such a minor node advantage
|
| Is that a minor advantage? I would think that, the smaller
| the nodes get, the larger the impact of a 1nm difference.
| Because transistors have area, I think the math, in
| [?]transistor count would be 3nm:4nm = 1/3 2:1/42, and
| that's 1,777... so a 3nm node could have 75% more
| transistors on a given die area than a 4nm one (roughly).
| Kirby64 wrote:
| 4nm -> 3nm no longer means size goes down as a result
| directly ratiometricly. You have to look at what TSMC is
| claiming for their improvements. They're claiming 5nm ->
| 3nm is a 70% density improvement (I can't find any 4nm ->
| 3nm claims)... so 4->3 must be much less.
|
| Also, most folks seem to have gone directly from 5nm to
| 3nm, and skipped 4nm altogether.
| valine wrote:
| Nvidia is somewhat encumbered by their need to optimize for
| raster performance. Ideally, all those transistors should
| be going toward tensor cores. Apple has never really taken
| the gaming market seriously. If they wanted to, they could
| ship their next M3 chip with identical GPU performance and
| use all that new 3nm die space for AI accelerators.
| philistine wrote:
| You're comparing a pickup truck with a Main Battle Tank. An
| RTX 3080 is an electricity hog and produces heat like a
| monster. No wonder it performs better than an M1 Ultra with
| a worse node tech.
| smoldesu wrote:
| The RTX 3080 consumes ~300w at load, the M1 Ultra
| consumes ~200w. If you extrapolate the M1 Ultra's
| performance to match the 3080, it would also consume
| roughly the same amount of power.
|
| Is this not a battle-tank-to-battle-tank comparison?
| lbourdages wrote:
| Since when is there a full fledged CPU in an RTX 3080?
| smoldesu wrote:
| You can run an RTX 3080 off anything with enough PCI
| bandwidth to handle it. Presumably the same goes for
| Apple's GPU. We could adjust for CPU wattage, but at-load
| it amounts to +/-40w on either side and when we're only
| testing the GPU it's like +/-10w maximum.
|
| The larger point is that Apple's lead doesn't extrapolate
| very far here, even with a generous comparison to a last-
| gen GPU. It will be great at inferencing, but so are most
| machines with AVX2 and 8 gigs of DRAM. If you're
| convinced Apple hardware is the apex of inferencing
| performance, you should Runpod a 40-series card and prove
| yourself wrong real quick. It's less than $1 and well
| worth the reality check.
| lbourdages wrote:
| My point was mostly that the 200W TDP you quote is for
| the whole package (CPU, GPU, RAM, plus the Neural network
| thingy and the whole IO stuff). A 120W figure for the GPU
| is more realistic.
|
| I'm not pretending the Apple chips are the be-all-end-all
| of performance. They certainly have limitations and are
| not able to compete with proper high end chips. However I
| can confidently say that on mobile devices and laptops,
| competition is largely behind. Sure a 1000+$ standalone
| GPU will be faster, but it doesn't fit in my jeans. It's
| the same as comparing a Hasselblad camera with the iPhone
| 14 pro...
| smoldesu wrote:
| The competition is all fine, though. They have enough
| memory to run the models, they have hardware acceleration
| (ARMnn, SNPE, etc.) and both OSes can run it fine.
| Apple's difference is... their own set of APIs and
| hardware options?
|
| How can you justify your claim that they're "largely
| behind"? It sounds to me like the competition is neck-
| and-neck in the consumer market, and blowing them out at-
| scale. It's simply hard to entertain that argument for a
| platform without CUDA, much less the performance crown or
| performance-per-watt crown.
| [deleted]
| cubefox wrote:
| > Apple silicone is primed for local AI models with its GPU,
| Neural Cores and the unified memory architecture.
|
| Is there any information on how they are doing with respect to
| local AI compared to other Smartphone SoCs? (Snapdragon,
| Tensor, Kirin, Helio etc)
| yyyk wrote:
| >They are in the unique position to enable local AI tools
|
| The only unique Apple thing here is how bad their AI products
| here and how behind they are in AI. This is the only thing that
| matters here - performance is adequate or better for the other
| processors out there, but you can't get anywhere without the
| appropriate software. Maybe they'll get smart enough to buy
| some AI startups/companies to get the missing talent.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Which AI products that they have actually implemented are
| bad? I think Siri is pretty poor to be fair and improves at a
| glacial pace. Pretty much everything else I'd say is state of
| the art from things like text selection from images, cutting
| out of image subject, their computational photography, even
| Map directions have come a long way.
| yyyk wrote:
| When people talk about AI they mean the new tech like LLM
| or Diffusion, and the only relevant Apple offering (Siri)
| is way behind and there's no evidence they have anything to
| replace it.
|
| (Aside, their image manipulation and Map is worse - though
| with Maps I dunno what's the underlying issue, and OCR was
| already mostly solved. I'm far from a photography expert so
| can't compare there).
| brookst wrote:
| With Apple it is always good to draw the distinction (as
| you did) between them _being behind_ and there being no
| evidence of them not being behind.
| yyyk wrote:
| True that. But I won't give Apple credit for products we
| can't see or assume good performance without proof. As
| they say in the movies: "Show me the money".
|
| I'll say though that no multibillion company is under
| existential threat. Not Apple, not Google and not even
| Intel. At worst they will lose a couple tens of billions
| and some marketshare. Even IBM still exists and took a
| long long time to fall to where it is still today.
| rodgerd wrote:
| > I think there is an important little nod to the future in
| this announcement. "Personal Voice" is training (likely fine
| tuning) and then running a local AI model to generate the
| user's voice.
|
| My Kiwi accent needs this _so bad_.
| detourdog wrote:
| Just yesterday I started using a new maxed out Mac mini and
| everything about it is snappy. I have no doubt that it is ready
| for enormous amount of background processing. Heavy background
| work is the only way to use the processing power in that little
| computer.
| samwillis wrote:
| Think Siri+ChatGPT trained on all your email, documents,
| browser history, messages, movements, everything. All local,
| no cloud, complete privacy.
|
| "Hey Siri, I had a meeting last summer in New York about
| project X, could you bring up all relevant documents and give
| me a brief summary of what we discussed and decisions we
| made. Oh and while you're at it, we ate at an awesome
| restaurant that evening, can you book a table for me for our
| meeting next week."
| throw384624 wrote:
| I would love if Apple created a personal iCloud device too.
|
| Let me sync my information to something local.
|
| I know there's Nextcloud, but it's not as seamless as
| iCloud.
| tough wrote:
| We should get the European Union to force Apple to offer
| an Icloud Local server thingy
| scarface74 wrote:
| Yes and we should also have EU regulators at every design
| meeting for every company. They did such a good job with
| the GDPR making the user experience better on the web
| tomcam wrote:
| Apparently, you are not an actual user of Siri, because I
| get jack shit out of her. speech to text is infinitely
| worse than the first week Siri was released.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Siri has felt like abandonware for years. My hope is
| something like a ChatGPT model is its replacement soon.
| igammarays wrote:
| This is already available with Rewind.ai + their GPT plugin
| and I've already asked such questions and got good answers.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Thats not what's being discussed though, which is Siri
| having these abilities built in
| samwillis wrote:
| Rewind.ai looks awesome, but only like 10% of what I'm
| thinking Apple could do.
| mattl wrote:
| Sounds like Knowledge Navigator
|
| https://youtu.be/umJsITGzXd0
| blitzar wrote:
| "Playing _Our Last Summer_ by ABBA on Apple Music "
| nicbou wrote:
| I _love_ Steve Jobs ' "bicycle for the mind" metaphor, and
| what you describe is the best possible example of this
| concept. A computer that does that would enable us to do so
| much more.
|
| This is the sort of AI I want; a true personal assistant,
| not a bullshit generator.
| y04nn wrote:
| It appears that we are tantalizingly close to have the
| perfect voice assistant. But for some inexplicable
| reason, it does not exist yet. Siri was introduced over a
| decade ago, and it seems that its development has not
| progressed as anticipated. Meanwhile, language models
| have made significant advancements. I am uncertain as to
| what is preventing Apple, a company with boundless
| resources, from enhancing Siri. Perhaps it is the absence
| of competition and the duopoly maintained by Apple and
| Google, both of whom seem reluctant to engage in a
| competitive battle within this domain.
| lamontcg wrote:
| It is probably a people problem. The people who really
| understood Siri have probably left, the managers left
| running it are scored primarily on not making any
| mistakes and staying off the headlines. Any engineers who
| understand what it would take to upgrade it aren't given
| the resources and spend their days on maintenance tasks
| that nobody really sees.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| It's more likely a perverse incentive problem. Voice
| activated "assistants" weren't viewed as assistance for
| end users. They were universally viewed as one of two
| things: A way of treating the consumer as a product, or a
| feature check-box.
|
| That Siri went from useful to far less useful had more to
| do with the aim to push products at you rather than
| actually accomplishing the task you set for Siri. If
| Apple actually delivers an assistant that works locally,
| doesn't make me the product, and generally makes it
| easier to accomplish _my_ tasks, then that 's a product
| worth paying for.
|
| When anyone asks "who benefits from 'AI'?" the answer is
| almost invariably "the people running the AI." Microsoft
| and OpenAI get more user data, and subscriptions. Google
| gets another vehicle for attention-injection. But if I
| run Vicuna or Alpaca (or some eventual equivalent) on my
| hardware, I can ensure I get what I need, and that
| there's much less hijacking of my intentions.
|
| So Microsoft, if you're listening: I don't want Bing Chat
| search, I want Cortana Local.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Doing what Siri is doing is not rocket science. It's a
| simple intent based system where you give it patterns to
| understand intents and you trigger some API based on it.
|
| Once you have the intents parsing, it should be just a
| matter of throwing man power at it and giving it better
| intents.
|
| Yes, I have experience with building on top of such a
| system.
| IOT_Apprentice wrote:
| It appears to be a leadership issue. Tim Cook wanted
| butts in seats at the corporate site, the Siri/AI Guys
| wanted to still work from home.
|
| And the AI team seemed to NOT want to be hidden in terms
| of discussion of industry ideas with peers at other
| firms.
|
| They went back to google. Magic 8 ball time.
|
| Who have they hired since then?
|
| Who knows?
|
| Who in leadership is allowing them to succeed?
|
| Results unclear try again.
|
| Who has a clear vision of why to build ALL ONBOARD the
| users device?
|
| Results unclear try again.
| bredren wrote:
| > All local, no cloud, complete privacy.
|
| This is already felt in use of Stable Diffusion, where M2
| is fully capable offline.
|
| Anything that can be done to reduce the need to "dial out"
| for processing protects the individual.
|
| It erodes the ability of business and governmental
| organizations to use knowledge of otherwise private matters
| to target and influence.
|
| The potential of moving a HQ LLM like GPT to the edge to
| answer everyday questions reminds me of my move from Google
| to DDG as my default search engine.
|
| Except it's even a bigger deal than that. It reduces
| private data exhaust from search to zero, making going to
| the net a backup plan instead of a necessity.
|
| Apple delivering this on device is a major threat to
| OpenAI, which will have to provide some LLM model with
| training that Apple can't or won't.
|
| Savvy users will begin to leer at having to produce queries
| over the wire, feeding valuable data (proven by ShareGPT)
|
| Even then, Apple will likely chose to or be forced to open
| up on device AI to allow user contributed apps like LORAs
| which would ask the question why does OpenAI need to exist?
|
| Also fascinating the potential to do this at the Server
| level for enterprise. If Apple produced a stack for
| enterprise training it could replace generalized data
| compute needs, shifting IT back to local or intranet.
| precompute wrote:
| >Think Siri+ChatGPT trained on all your email, documents,
| browser history, messages, movements, everything. All
| local, no cloud, complete privacy.
|
| That sounds absolutely horrifying if you remove the "all
| local" part. And that part's a pipe dream anyway. Plus,
| when using a model you'd basically become subservient /
| limited to the type of data in the model, which would
| necessarily abide by Apple's TOS, so a couple of hundred
| million people would be the Apple TOS but in human form. I
| don't understand why apple fanboys don't get this. Apple is
| pretty shoddy when privacy is concerned. Are these apple
| employees making these posts?
| addandsubtract wrote:
| Fat chance Apple will alow us to do this locally. More
| like, upgrade to Apple Cloud Plus to get these features.
| But yeah, I've also dreamt of what my Apple hardware
| _could_ do.
| fastball wrote:
| Apple already does all existing AI stuff locally. The
| main one being categorizing images in your Photos
| library.
| danieldk wrote:
| Why not? They do on-device training of face recognition:
|
| https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/recognizing-
| peopl...
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Actually Apple is much more device-first than cloud-first
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| All of my current experience with Siri tells me there is a
| 50-50 chance of the result coming back as "Sorry, I have
| having trouble connecting to the network" or playing a
| random song from Apple Music.
|
| Just last night, we were entertaining our toddler with
| animal sounds. It worked with "Hey Siri, what does a goat
| sound like?", then we were able to do horse, cow, sheep,
| boar, and it somehow got tripped up on pig, for which it
| responded with the Wikipedia entry and told us to look at
| the phone for more info.
| detourdog wrote:
| The more they can move Siri on device the less that will
| happen.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _there is a 50-50 chance of the result coming back as
| "Sorry, I have having trouble connecting to the network"_
|
| Doesn't the locally-run LLM bit solve this particular
| grievance? I'm picturing a personal AI a la Kim Stanley
| Robinson's _Mars_ trilogy.
| basch wrote:
| Yes. I dont understand the criticism of the current Siri
| in this context, the point of a language model on the
| device would be to derive intent and convert a colloquial
| command into a computer instruction.
| smileybarry wrote:
| Today I asked Siri for the weather this week. She said
| daytime ranges from 31C to 23C, so I then asked "on what
| day is the temperature 31 celsius?". And, of course, what
| I got back was "it's currently twenty seven degrees".
| hn_version_0023 wrote:
| The only requests that work consistently well for me are:
|
| "Hey Siri, whats the weather?" and "Hey Siri, what the
| X-day forecast". Everything else is a huge mess.
| te_chris wrote:
| The weather ones are so annoying: "Is it going to rain
| today?". "It looks like it's going to rain today". "What
| time is it going to rain today?". "It looks like it's
| going to rain today".
| dmd wrote:
| me: hey siri weather
|
| siri: The temperature is currently 54 degrees. Expect
| clear skies starting in the evening, going down to 52
| degrees tonight.
|
| me: hey siri what's the high today
|
| siri: the high today will be 84 degrees
|
| me: hey siri will it rain today?
|
| siri: Expect heavy thunderstorms around noon
|
| Note nothing it said in the original was actually
| wrong...
| coldtea wrote:
| > _All of my current experience with Siri tells me there
| is a 50-50 chance of the result coming back as "Sorry, I
| have having trouble connecting to the network" or playing
| a random song from Apple Music._
|
| Well, this is about adding ChatGPT-level smartness to
| Siri, not just the semi-dumb assistant of yore.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Federico Viticci's S-GPT is doing some pretty neat things
| using Shortcuts
|
| https://www.macstories.net/ios/introducing-s-gpt-a-
| shortcut-...
|
| Some examples from that blog post:
|
| > I'm feeling nostalgic. Make me a playlist with 25
| mellow indie rock songs released between 2000 and 2010
| and sort them by release year, from oldest to most
| recent.
|
| This doesn't just return a list of songs, it will create
| the playlist for you in Music.
|
| > Check the paragraphs of text in my clipboard for
| grammar mistakes. Provide a list of mistakes, annotate
| them, and offer suggestions for fixes.
|
| > Summarize the text in my clipboard
|
| > Go back to the original text and translate it into
| Italian
|
| I haven't tried it myself, but it has other integrations
| like "live text" where your phone can pull text out of an
| image and then could send that to GPT to be summarized.
|
| Version 1.0.2 makes improvements for using it via Siri
| including on HomePod.
| smcleod wrote:
| Siri was so good before iOS 13, I'm not sure what they
| did in that release but it went from around 90-95%
| accuracy and 80-90% contextual understanding - down to
| 70% and 75% respectively.
|
| As someone who dictates more than half of their messages
| and is an incredibly heavy user of Siri for performing
| basic tasks I really noticed this sudden decline in
| quality and it's never got back up there - in fact, iOS
| 16 really struggles with many basic words. Before iOS 13.
| I would have been able to dictate these two paragraphs
| likely without any errors however, I've just had to edit
| them in five places.
| iknowstuff wrote:
| [flagged]
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I thought the lack of ability to execute on current
| "easy" queries would indicate something about ability to
| execute something as complicated as figuring out the
| restaurant you ate at and making a reservation. At least
| anytime in the next few years.
| fwlr wrote:
| I don't think it does. This isn't a hypothetical Siri v2
| with some upgrades; it's a hypothetical LLM chatbot
| speaking with Siri's voice. I recall one of the first
| demonstrations of Bing's ability was someone asking it to
| book him a concert where he wouldn't need a jacket. It
| searched the web for concert locations, searched the web
| weather information, picked a location that fit the
| constraint and gave the booking link for that specific
| ticket. If you imagine an Apple LLM that has local rather
| than web search, it seems obvious that this exact ability
| that LLMs have to follow complicated requests and "figure
| things out" would be perfectly suited to reading your
| emails and figuring out which restaurant you mean. With
| ApplePay integration it could also go ahead and book for
| you.
| s3p wrote:
| HN is the only place where you can get paragraphs of text
| and comments that argue in circles about a nonexistent
| issue.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Yeah. It's been my experience, the longer the comment,
| the predictably more unhinged and/or pedantic it becomes.
| coldtea wrote:
| And yet the parent makes a very specific (and correct)
| comment, that this wont be Siri with some upgrades, but
| Siri in the name only, with a totally different
| architecture.
|
| Whereas yours and your sibling comment are just
| irrelevant meta-comments.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| At least the irony of this comment isn't lost on one of
| us.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Aside from anything else, your claim is absurd. There are
| huge parts of the internet dedicated to exactly that.
| coldtea wrote:
| You'd think that, but you'd be wrong.
|
| Microsoft voice assistant was equally dumb as Siri, but
| ChatGPT is another thing entirely. Wont even be the same
| team at all, is most likely.
|
| So nothing about their prior ability, or lack thereof, to
| make Siri smart means anything about their ability to
| execute if they add a large LLM in there.
| mason55 wrote:
| Siri today is built on what's essentially completely
| different concepts from something like ChatGPT.
|
| There are demos of using ChatGPT to turn normal English
| into Alexa commands and it's pretty flawless. If you
| assume Apple can pretty easily leverage LLM tech on Siri
| and do it locally via silicon in the M3 or M4, it's only
| a matter of chip lead time before Siri has multiple
| orders of magnitude improvement.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| That would be a pleasant surprise!
| rschoultz wrote:
| That experience likely isn't transferable to Siri, that
| has deeper problems. People, me included, are reporting
| their problems with Siri, e.g. setting it to transcribing
| what they and Siri says as text on the screen, and then
| are able to show that given input as "Please add milk to
| the shopping list" results in Siri responding "I do not
| understand what speaker you refer to.", in writing.
|
| Likely problems like these could be overcome, but
| preparing better input would probably not address the
| root cause of the problems with Siri.
| [deleted]
| joshspankit wrote:
| You've touched on what is probably the biggest reason I
| don't use Siri more: Apple does not limit it to what's
| important to me as user.
|
| I have thousands of contacts, lots of photos, videos, and
| emails, all in Apple's first-party apps and yet Siri is
| more likely to respond with a popular song or listing of
| news articles that's only tangentially connected to my
| request.
| Smoosh wrote:
| > me as user
|
| This becomes more complicated when Siri is the interface
| on a homepod in a shared area. Who's data and preferences
| should be used? Ideally it would recognise different
| voices and give that person's data priority, but how much
| can/should be shared between users? Where are these data
| - they shouldn't be in the homepod, so it would have to
| task the phone with finding the answer. I'm sure
| something good could be done here, but it wouldn't be
| easy.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > All of my current experience with Siri tells me there
| is a 50-50 chance of the result coming back as "Sorry, I
| have having trouble connecting to the network" or playing
| a random song from Apple Music.
|
| Meanwhile, Google and Amazon have decided that the data
| center costs of their approach just aren't worth it.
|
| >Google Assistant has never made money. The hardware is
| sold at cost, it doesn't have ads, and nobody pays a
| monthly fee to use the Assistant. There's also the
| significant server cost to process all those voice
| commands, though some newer devices have moved to on-
| device processing in a stealthy cost-cutting move. The
| Assistant's biggest competitor, Amazon Alexa, is in the
| same boat and loses $10 billion a year.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/03/google-assistant-
| mig...
|
| Both companies made big cuts to the teams running their
| voice assistant tech.
| sroussey wrote:
| I'm working on something very much like this!
| hammock wrote:
| Do you think it would be good/capable for audio or video
| editing?
| brookst wrote:
| UMA may turn out to be visionary. I really wonder if they saw
| the AI/ML trend or just lucked out. Either way, the apple
| silicon arch is looking very strong for local AI. It's a lot
| easier to beef up the NPU than to redo memory arch.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I think pretty much any multicore ARM CPU with a post ARMv8
| ISA is looking pretty strong for local AI right now. Same
| goes for x86 chips with AVX2 support.
|
| All of them are pretty weak for local training. But having
| reasonably powerful inferencing hardware isn't very hard at
| all, UMA doesn't seem very visionary to me in an era of
| MMAPed AI models.
| danieldk wrote:
| _I think pretty much any multicore ARM CPU with a post
| ARMv8 ISA is looking pretty strong for local AI right now.
| Same goes for x86 chips with AVX2 support._
|
| Apple Silicon AMX units provide the matrix multiplication
| performance of many core CPUs or faster at a fraction of
| the wattage. See eg.
|
| https://explosion.ai/blog/metal-performance-shaders
| https://github.com/danieldk/gemm-benchmark#1-to-16-threads
| smoldesu wrote:
| Yes, and generic multicore ARM CPUs can run ARM's
| standard compute library regardless of their hardware:
| https://github.com/ARM-software/armnn
|
| Plus, the benchmark you've linked to is comparing
| hardware accelerated inferencing to the notoriously
| crippled MKL execution. A more appropriate comparison
| would test Apple's AMX units against the Ryzen's AVX-
| optimized inferencing.
| danieldk wrote:
| Nope, the benchmarks are done by disabling the MKL AMD
| cripple (I did these benchmarks). It's not faster with
| eg. AMD BLIS.
| brookst wrote:
| The visionary part is having a computer with 64GB RAM that
| can be used either for ML or for traditional desktop
| purposes. It means fewer HW SKUs, which improve scale
| economy. And it means the same HW can be repurposed for
| different users, versus PCs where you have to replace CPU
| and/or GPU.
|
| For raw ML performance in a hyper-optimized system, UMA is
| not a big deal. For a company that needs to ship millions
| of units and estimate demand quarters in advance, it seems
| like a pretty big deal.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Is it very different from their previous desktop lineup?
| I'm under the impression that Intel Macs can also run ML
| models with acceleration.
| brookst wrote:
| Very different. Intel Macs had separate system RAM and
| video RAM, like PCs.
|
| Apple Silicon doesn't just share address space with
| memory mapping, it's literally all the same RAM, and it
| can be allocated to CPU or GPU. If you get a 96GB M2 Mac,
| it can be an 8GB system with 88GB high speed GPU memory,
| or a 95.5GB CPU system with a tiny bit of GPU memory.
|
| Apple's GPUs are slow today (compared to state of the art
| nvidia/etc), but if Apple upped the GPU horsepower, the
| system arch puts them far ahead of PC-based systems.
| vrglvrglvrgl wrote:
| [dead]
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| They would enable 10x more people if they allowed to use their
| assistant with 3rd party language recognition service that
| supports languages remaining 60% of worlds population...
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| This really is Apple at their best. In fact it's technology at
| its best.
|
| Nice to have something to comment on that doesn't elicit any
| cynicism!
| amelius wrote:
| I still can't use it in my own hardware products. This is
| reusability at its worst.
| bkandel wrote:
| Another underserved group of users is people with ADHD. I think a
| "minimize distractions" mode at the OS level would be very
| welcome by a lot of people.
| dagmx wrote:
| The OS does have focus modes as of a year or two ago. You can
| set it up to only allow the apps and notifications you want.
|
| Plus you can have multiple to suit the context you're in
| tikkun wrote:
| I wonder if the "make the buttons larger" features will also help
| apps prepare for when we are using them on virtual reality and
| augmented reality, where they need to be bigger and with fewer
| options.
| KyeRussell wrote:
| I 100% believe that Apple is putting real effort into co-design
| of these features in a way that other similarly positioned
| companies do not.
|
| As someone with a disability, these features--even those do not
| cater to my disability--speak to me in a much more direct way
| than the typical "let's guess what the disabled people want"
| bucket of accessibility features.
| Legtar wrote:
| This is completely incomprehensible to me. Okay, Russia's image
| is far from being the best now, and it's hard for many to even
| stand next to it. But Apple does not go away and continues to
| collect money.
|
| Yes, and they speak Russian not only in the Russian Federation.
| Almost the entire former CIS could use it, but here they cut it
| down to only Ukrainians. Disabled people from Kazakhstan, Belarus
| and other countries somehow guilty?
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| Honestly without needing to personally use the accessibility
| features, I think I might be taking a look at the new layouts,
| because I really yearn to make my device more minimalistic, there
| is just to much going on in modern devices.
|
| But Bravo to Apple once again for doing excellent accessibility
| features and continuing to improve them.
| efields wrote:
| Accessibility makes life better for everybody. A lot of
| accessibility boils down to rethinking the obvious to enable
| _more_ use cases. "Things that might make your life better."
| Dig around in those settings and you might find your phone can
| do things you never thought of.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| There are so many. One feature most people don't know about
| is macOS can speak the current time every 60, 30, or 15
| minutes. (Settings > Control Center > Clock) It's a very old
| feature.
|
| Most people can't understand why they would want a computer
| speaking the time, it would drive them nuts. I have ADHD and
| no sense of time passing. It helps me offload keeping track
| of time. (Which is otherwise continuously looking at a
| clock.)
|
| I also turn off every auto-playing feature in any app that
| supports it. Some types of motion can be highly distracting.
| That can trigger a panic attack if I'm constantly needing to
| redirect my focus away from it. (If this sounds strange, it
| causes me to feel trapped in a tiny closet. Anxiety is a
| bitch.)
|
| Google's latest video conferencing iteration lets people spam
| flying emoji. It's a "fun" feature that is absolute hell for
| me. Fortunately, there is a buried setting to remove it from
| my view.
| efields wrote:
| I never thought about using that feature but I should for
| the same reasons. I have a LCD digital clock right under my
| monitor even tho the OS has a clock of course. But as soon
| as I'm "immersed" in something, or the menubar is obscured
| bc I do keep some apps fullscreen, time does not exist.
|
| It also has the temp and humidity and looks attractive and
| runs on usb: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B088LZRT94/r
| ef=ppx_yo_dt_b...
|
| Its a good clock.
| thiht wrote:
| I have a habit of checking the accessibility features from time
| to time, there's great stuff in there :)
|
| My favorite is Spoken Content > Speak Screen: you can swipe
| down with two fingers from the top of the screen and it'll read
| the written content for you. I use it to read articles in
| Safari while I'm brushing my teeth or walking my dog
| DrScientist wrote:
| Computers being able to impersonate your voice is clearly an area
| that is a danger in AI.
|
| The tech has been around a while, but is getting better and
| better.
|
| If I had a job as a voice-over artist, I'd be worried.
| qgin wrote:
| These features that will be built into the operating system are
| things that otherwise would have cost someone hundreds to
| thousands of dollars before... if they even existed at all.
|
| I love that Apple chooses to invest in these areas of
| accessibility that are extremely difficult to make sustainable
| businesses out of without charging users exorbitant sums.
| jmbwell wrote:
| Aside: "Apple Newsroom _needs your permission_ to enable desktop
| notifications. " Boo. Boo this page.
|
| It only needs that permission if I _want_ to enable that. C 'mon,
| Apple. You know better than this.
| Alifatisk wrote:
| Didn't apple work on their own search engine? What happened to
| that?
| CharlesW wrote:
| It's not unusual for Apple to build the pieces it needs for
| "moonshot" efforts (e.g. a search engine good enough to replace
| Google) over the course of many years. Apple likely started
| thinking about this over a decade ago, and you can see
| precursors in things like Siri suggestions and search, App
| Store and Apple Music search, Apple Photos search, etc.
| elicash wrote:
| I'm not the target audience for these features, and don't want to
| speculate on behalf of others, so I'll just focus on my own
| needs...
|
| Live Speech: I actually answer unknown phone numbers (usually)
| and would like text-to-speech on my calls because I've started to
| get concerned about what can be done, fraud-wise, with even small
| samples of my voice. So in this case, using another's voice is
| fine, even preferred. (Edit: I suppose I'd actually prefer a
| voice-changer here, which is less related to this accessibility
| feature. But I think Apple is unlikely to do that.)
|
| Personal Voice: When my girlfriend texts me when I'm out with my
| AirPods, I think we'd both like me to hear her message in her
| actual voice rather than Siri's. This feature doesn't allow for
| that yet, but the pieces are all there.
|
| Finally, Apple needs to detect and tell me when I'm listening to
| a synthetic voice, including when it's not being generated by
| Apple. There's fraud potential here. I'm clearly excited about
| this tech, but I want to know more on this front.
| jansommer wrote:
| A voice changer for unknown or blocked caller id's is actually
| a great idea. Just looked in F-Droid and the Play Store, where
| there seems to be no such app. Preventing callers from sampling
| my voice is a concern I did not know I have.
| thiht wrote:
| > Personal Voice: When my girlfriend texts me when I'm out with
| my AirPods, I think we'd both like me to hear her message in
| her actual voice rather than Siri's.
|
| That's genius!
| smith7018 wrote:
| It's also hard to do privacy-wise unless every text message
| she sends pre-generates the audio message using her on-device
| voice and then attaches it. That would make every message use
| 10x as much bandwidth, storage, and battery power. (10x is a
| random number but you get the point). Seems cute but really
| impractical.
| tshaddox wrote:
| 10x compared to what though? FaceTime (and similar) is
| already full-duplex video and audio, which I have to
| imagine is at least another 10x on top of what you're
| describing. Are we really budgeting our computer resources
| so strictly that this would even show up as more than a
| rounding error?
| kevinsundar wrote:
| I would think that your phone could request audio messages
| from the sender only when necessary. They already sync
| things like your DND status to show others so this would
| just be another flag. Messages could also then alert the
| sender that their message may be read aloud in their
| Personal Voice. Or maybe allow turning this on per
| conversation.
| packetlost wrote:
| I think I'd rather just eliminate the ringing portion of a
| phone call (when I have airpods in) and instead just let a
| trusted list of contacts talk directly into my ear (1-way)
| until I "answer" and open up a 2-way channel.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| Not sure if you ever had a Nextel phone, but they had a
| cellular walkie talkie feature for awhile. It was pretty
| popular in my high school circa 2003, but I remember kinda
| hating it.
| zamadatix wrote:
| The "answer" button seems to serve to also say "I'm ready
| to listen" as much as it does to say "I'm ready to say".
| IMO this kind of goal is better covered by voice messages,
| or, at least, starting with a voice message. This allows
| the receiver to pick when they are ready to hear it
| (including immediately), replay it as needed, and choose
| when they respond (if at all). Many of these are benefits
| for the sender as much as the receiver.
| kevinsundar wrote:
| Isn't this the walkie talkie feature built into the Apple
| Watch? Could be ported over to iPhone.
| hosteur wrote:
| Also a bit creepy.
| smileybarry wrote:
| > Finally, Apple needs to detect and tell me when I'm listening
| to a synthetic voice.
|
| There's already some version of this in "Hey Siri" detection --
| if I record myself with a prompt and play it back, my HomePod
| briefly wakes up at the "Hey Siri" but turns off mid-prompt. I
| guessed it was some loudspeaker detection using the microphone
| array, but it could be a mix of both?
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| I was thinking it would be fun just to have Siri use a Personal
| Voice, but your idea is better! And it could just offer to make
| your Personal Voice data available along with your Contact
| picture.
| bnj wrote:
| While that sounds like it would unlock some very cool
| experiences it also scares me to think about the potential
| abuses of making personalized voice models fairly easily
| available. It seems like the sort of thing that would need to
| stay secure on your own device. It would be great to see some
| kind of middle ground where a text to speech mechanism would
| generate audio output and send that, rather than make the
| model itself available.
| [deleted]
| somebody78978 wrote:
| > When my girlfriend texts me when I'm out with my AirPods, I
| think we'd both like me to hear her message in her actual voice
| rather than Siri's
|
| And then you can use voice to text to text her back, and she
| can hear it in your voice! It's just like a phone call from 30
| years ago, but one that requires infinitely more processing
| power!
| elicash wrote:
| Genuinely funny reply. But (a) whether I prefer typing or
| speaking, and (b) whether I prefer reading or hearing, is
| very context-dependent and might not be the same for the
| person at the other end -- and so yeah I think having
| flexibility there is good! If I'm on AirPods and not on my
| phone, I'd like to hear the message. CarPlay, too. When
| actively on my phone, I prefer to type, even if on AirPods.
| CarPlay, I shouldn't probably be typing ever. So yeah,
| generating text and speech simultaneously and having the end
| result be situational is in fact a good thing.
|
| It's worth noting this is already how iPhones work and people
| already love it. What I'm suggesting additionally is
| substituting Siri's voice for a DIFFERENT customized
| synthetic voice in a very specific circumstance. I'm not
| advocating for using synthetic voices where there currently
| aren't any here.
| Someone wrote:
| On the plus side it would use less bandwidth. That phone call
| from 30 years ago probably used (ballpark) 64kilobits/second.
| This could use a lot less and have higher audio quality.
|
| See it as data compression on the wire.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _It 's just like a phone call from 30 years ago, but one that
| requires infinitely more processing power!_
|
| And latency!
| throwaway54_56 wrote:
| > It's just like a phone call from 30 years ago
|
| Disagree that it's the same at all. Sending discrete messages
| at your leisure is quite a different experience than a real-
| time conversation.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _It 's just like a phone call from 30 years ago, but one
| that requires infinitely more processing power_
|
| There are folks who couldn't, for a variety of reasons, do
| that thirty years ago. This feature is for them. The rest of
| us get to _e.g._ more naturally text a response to a call
| we're listening into on a flight.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Can't you already do that with iMessage's voice delivery
| feature?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Can 't you already do that with iMessage's voice
| delivery feature?_
|
| Voice memos? No. I would have to, at some point, speak
| it. If you're referring to text-to-speech, there is a
| difference between having your speech read in a different
| voice and your own.
| MourYother wrote:
| > When my girlfriend texts me when I'm out with my AirPods, I
| think we'd both like me to hear her message in her actual voice
| rather than Siri's.
|
| Other consequences of this feature:
|
| - typos and autocorrect become even more hilarious
|
| - you can still use her voice after you break up; heck, you
| probably don't ever need to date the person
|
| - at this point: why wouldn't you pick Scarlett Johansson?
| microtherion wrote:
| > you can still use her voice after you break up
|
| Which is potentially quite problematic as you could abuse
| this for all sorts of social engineering purposes.
| masklinn wrote:
| > Personal Voice: When my girlfriend texts me when I'm out with
| my AirPods, I think we'd both like me to hear her message in
| her actual voice rather than Siri's. (This feature doesn't
| allow for that yet, but the pieces are all there.)
|
| Neat idea, same with carplay, having it reliably imitate the
| voice of the person who sent the message would make it a lot
| nicer.
|
| Though they would need to get all the TTS and intonation right
| first, which IME is not the case, I think having the right
| voice but the wrong intonation entirely would be one hell of an
| uncanny valley.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| When my computer talks to me, it needs to be in Majel
| Barrett's voice. Anything else is just not acceptable.
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| Surely Shatner has sold his voice already like Bruce Willis
| did? I'd pay to hear my morning information read in the
| voice of the shat, in the format of a captain's log.
| devinprater wrote:
| I wish they'd have a year of fixing accessibility bugs instead of
| making feature after feature. Like they had one release of 16
| where if you opened the notification center with a Braille
| display connected, which is crucial for Deaf-Blind people, the
| display would disconnect. This was brought up during betas, but
| it still made it into production. Now there's this bug where if
| you're reading a book with your Braille display, after a page or
| two you can't scroll down a line to continue reading. Also
| they've been working on a new speech platform, and it's pretty
| buggy.
|
| I'm not saying Android is any better. We get a new Braille HID
| standard, in 2018, and the Android OS doesn't support it yet. So
| what does the TalkBack team have to do? Graft drivers for each
| Braille HID display into TalkBack, Android's screen reader like
| VoiceOver, with another driver coming in TalkBack 14 cause of
| course they can't update Android Accessibility suite like they do
| Google Maps, Google Drive, Google Opinion Rewards, and even
| Google Voice gets an update every few weeks. I mean, the
| accessibility suite is not a system app. If it were, it could
| just grab Bluetooth access and do whatever. But it's not, so it
| should be able to be updated far more frequently than it is. It's
| sad that Microsoft out of all these big companies that'll talk
| and talk and talk, which doesn't always include Apple, that has
| HID Braille support in the OS. Apple has HID Braille support too.
| Google doesn't, though, neither in Android or ChromeOS. They just
| piggy-back off of BRLTTY for all their stuff.
| specialist wrote:
| Organizationally, I'd love a separate "cleaning crew", whose
| primary job is chewing thru the back log. Outside of the
| release cycle.
|
| There's dozens of us who revel in polish, fit, and finish.
| latexr wrote:
| It's not just accessibility, everything about their operating
| systems is crawling with bugs piling up on each other. They
| have bugs in Passwords, bugs in Shortcuts, bugs in permissions,
| bugs in Clock... I can no longer even trust that setting an
| alarm will be done for the correct time.
| thfuran wrote:
| It seems like just about the whole industry is massively over-
| prioritizing feature delivery over bug fixing and UX polish.
| w10-1 wrote:
| "if you opened the notification center with a Braille display
| connected"
|
| This sounds obvious, but imagine all the combinations of all
| the features that can interact, and then imagine having to test
| them all manually, because there's no automated model for
| specific Braille displays.
|
| For decades, integration testing teams outnumber developers.
| It's just a hard problem, particularly at Apple's scale. It's
| not unlikely that there are only 10's of users experiencing a
| bug (though this one likely has thousands), and that it would
| take doubling or tripling the size of teams to find all these
| bugs before release.
| dotancohen wrote:
| OP is taking about fixing issues that the users already found
| and reported.
| scosman wrote:
| The is is amazing. I have a non speaking person in my life and
| the idea of them being able to create their own unique voice is
| so powerful. Stephen Hawkins kept his voice synth years after
| better tech was available because he wanted to keep his voice.
|
| If anyone here is interested-in or working-on open-source tech
| for the non speaking please reach out. I'm building tech that
| uses LLMs and Whisper.cpp to greatly reduce the amount of typing
| needed. What apple has here is great, it still requires typing in
| real-time to communicate. Many of the diseases that take your
| voice also impact fine motor control, so tools to be expressive
| with minimal typing are super important. Details (and link to
| GitHub projects) here:
| https://scosman.net/blog/introducing_voicebox
| mouzogu wrote:
| I put a white wallpaper on the iPad because of my astigmatism,
| and the clock is invisible because the colours dont inverse like
| Android.
|
| The icons and toolbar items do not scale up to respect my
| accessibility display/font settings.
|
| even windows 10 allows me fine grained control over all UI sizing
| elements. but Apple apparently has other priorities.
| [deleted]
| FredPret wrote:
| Does Invert Colors not work for you? Settings -> Accessibility
| -> Display & Text Size -> Classic Invert or Smart Invert
| [deleted]
| mouzogu wrote:
| I will try thanks
| layer8 wrote:
| You can also configure the Accessibility Shortcut (triple
| click on side button) to toggle it on demand.
| FredPret wrote:
| On the same page is a Zoom option that gives you a
| magnifying pane you can move around, and I know there's a
| way to increase the system font size as well.
| knolan wrote:
| I've just set a white wallpaper on my iPad and the clock and
| date are displayed as block on white. On my dark wallpaper the
| clock and date are displayed inverted as white. This works with
| dark or light mode also with background dimming on or off.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-05-16 23:01 UTC)