by carlycue on 4/27/23, 4:01 PM with 469 comments
by lynx23 on 4/27/23, 5:31 PM
by throwaway_ab on 4/27/23, 5:10 PM
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.
by zer0zzz on 4/28/23, 7:00 AM
by Dennip on 4/27/23, 4:58 PM
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.
by nneonneo on 4/27/23, 4:45 PM
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.
by epaga on 4/28/23, 5:28 AM
With ChatGPT it is now feeling like Siri the broken tricycle is being compared to a Lamborghini.
Honestly I would have been concerned if Apple employees weren’t frustrated with Siri.
Pretty sure they need to take Siri out to pasture and start some LLM-based project from scratch.
by huehehue on 4/27/23, 7:12 PM
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.
by highwaylights on 4/28/23, 8:59 AM
Apple is now at a point where even the oldest supported devices on their latest operating systems have either decent dedicated ML hardware or are Intel-based machines with enough compute power that they should really be able to do a much better job with inferencing locally (and the server component is irrelevant to local device capabilities anyway).
It should’ve been possible to bin Siri’s backend and rebuild something better from scratch by now. That Apple is swimming in money just makes things like this more jarring.
It’s honestly my greatest gripe with Apple as a software company. They put a lot of effort into polishing what they release but seemingly very little into maintaining it afterwards. macOS is the worst offender, where basic and fundamental things stay broken for years on end (settings not being applied after selection in the UI, permissions being set in the UI but not actually taking effect despite being set, continuity stopping working silently in FaceTime and iMessage. It’s gotten so bad I just accept that some former tentpole features no longer exist because they’ve become so broken and no-one cares to fix them).
Back to Siri though, it’s gotten substantially worse than when I used to use it on an iPhone 4S. That’s a decade plus of consistent regression while Google Assistant continues to progress. It’s so bad, and can’t be replaced, that I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a leading cause of people exiting the eco-system altogether.
by ghaff on 4/27/23, 4:28 PM
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).
by ninkendo on 4/27/23, 6:26 PM
- 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.
by idk1 on 4/27/23, 5:27 PM
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.
by dang on 4/28/23, 5:02 AM
by jiggawatts on 4/27/23, 5:12 PM
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.
by doubtfuluser on 4/28/23, 5:28 AM
Home automation is in my opinion totally stupid to do by voice. The light should switch on when it is dark and I go into a room and should switch off when none is in the room. But using voice which 99% of the time works is “slower”, and in one percent of the time it is annoying if the light in my kids room switches in.
I see use in the Knowledge augmented ChatGPT like assistants, since then I could reliably ask a digital assistant for information. Right now I know the moment the assistant starts answering with “this is what I found on the web” that it’s going to be wrong. Similar annoying is that Alexa for example seems to rewrite some requests, where I ask about “what is X” and I get the answer on “what is Y”.
I’m pretty disillusioned and disappointed in all the different voice assistants out there, and I seriously think that voice on top of gpt will actually help me get more often what I want.
by adam_arthur on 4/27/23, 4:58 PM
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
by geuis on 4/27/23, 6:18 PM
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.
by awisema on 4/27/23, 6:58 PM
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…
by amatwl on 4/28/23, 5:03 AM
"Siri, please turn off all the lights in my apartment."
"Sure, which room?"
Sigh.
by snapetom on 4/27/23, 7:06 PM
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.
by WonderBuilder on 4/27/23, 5:25 PM
Shortcuts & Siri is honestly the main reason I switched from Android to iOS.
by sharkweek on 4/27/23, 4:31 PM
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.
by purpleblue on 4/27/23, 4:26 PM
by PaulStatezny on 4/27/23, 4:36 PM
"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.
by srg0 on 4/28/23, 12:10 PM
Neither Siri nor its competition can do this. Speech recognition accuracy is not really important, it can just take voice notes as a fallback, or ask to "press 1" to talk to me directly.
by neilv on 4/27/23, 4:30 PM
How do they conduct the interviews, in that situation?
Not the usual tech megacorp brogrammer "technical interview" hazing?
by nineplay on 4/27/23, 4:44 PM
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.
by aroundtown on 4/27/23, 4:57 PM
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.
by gnicholas on 4/28/23, 5:38 AM
by nextlevelwizard on 4/28/23, 8:33 AM
by rickreynoldssf on 4/27/23, 5:24 PM
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".
by cj on 4/28/23, 12:28 PM
He (she's set to an Australian male voice) is great if you know exactly what to say to get exactly what you want. He's horrible with general requests that you haven't made before.
Particularly with smart home devices.
by GenerWork on 4/27/23, 5:00 PM
by eachro on 4/27/23, 4:34 PM
by wkat4242 on 4/27/23, 5:17 PM
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.
by m_st on 4/28/23, 7:33 AM
Then I use Siri a lot with my HomePods for music. It works rather well, but when it fails it hurts. Sometimes a new song is playing that I like. So I say "Hey Siri add this song to my inbox playlist." Siri then occasionally tells me "OK, I'm playing some-other-song-you-didn't-ask-for." There is then no way to return back to the previous song or find out what it was.
I hate Siri when these things happen.
by pavedwalden on 4/27/23, 5:33 PM
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"
by gumby on 4/28/23, 5:23 AM
Unlike the Newton they don’t seem to have fixed it … or better yet, replaced it.
I’m surprised Giannandrea hasn’t junked it by now.
by jeromeof on 4/27/23, 6:06 PM
by jhwhite on 4/27/23, 4:34 PM
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.
by bluejekyll on 4/27/23, 4:43 PM
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.
by HellDunkel on 4/28/23, 6:53 AM
by louison11 on 4/28/23, 8:53 AM
So they're clearly still in prime position to make their product better, even if they're behind right now. That's unless they get an antitrust lawsuit for unfair monopoly, which they probably should get considering this seems to me similar to what Windows was doing forcing IE as the default browser back in the days. Just like people should be able to choose their default browser, they should be able to choose their default voice assistant.
by ianferrel on 4/27/23, 4:57 PM
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.
by qwertox on 4/28/23, 10:47 AM
I can't wait for them to start including LLM-AI voice chatting where one can properly tell the phone what I want it to do.
by michelb on 4/27/23, 7:51 PM
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.
by anonzzzies on 4/29/23, 9:07 AM
Oh yeah, the keyboard replacing fuck with duck even though I never wrote duck until now is enough reason to pop over to Android.
by knolan on 4/28/23, 10:48 AM
For example you might search for a street in maps and search will just give up and just give you a half arsed result. Searching for HN Boulevard might instead HN Avenue even though you can see the correct result right there on the map.
You see similar behaviour in Music, App Store etc.
by heliophobicdude on 4/27/23, 5:38 PM
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.
by crawsome on 4/28/23, 11:36 AM
I don't trust any voice assistant because I know every query is being stored, analyzed, and I don't own my own communications with the asssistant. I also don't get to customize the assistant.
It's basically a shitty-future branding assistant who is inclined to send you to product pages and shit to buy.
by ChildOfChaos on 4/27/23, 6:16 PM
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.
by cmdrk on 4/27/23, 4:36 PM
by sarks_nz on 4/27/23, 7:21 PM
Me: "Siri, give me directions to vaguely ethnic sounding café" where café 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.
by alfiedotwtf on 4/28/23, 11:10 AM
That's about all of Siri I've ever found useful in the past 10 years or so
by devmor on 4/27/23, 4:57 PM
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".
by baseline-shift on 4/30/23, 1:23 AM
by reddog on 4/28/23, 12:52 PM
But now after some remarkable experiences using GPT-4 I find I’ve lost a lot of patience with all the different voice assistants. They are just so stupid in comparison. How much longer before LLMs and projects like Whisper run the backend?
by whywhywhywhy on 4/27/23, 4:27 PM
Then again the only thing I've used it for since launch is setting timers, rarely gets that right these days.
by awill88 on 4/29/23, 8:06 AM
by meling on 4/28/23, 8:59 AM
by aidenn0 on 4/28/23, 6:43 AM
My wife has an iPhone and it's hilariously bad at this. She needs complete silence and even then it's a coin flip.
by anon1234 on 4/28/23, 11:11 AM
For $1B+ invested.
by hinkley on 4/27/23, 5:12 PM
Said in the tone of Cobie Smulders in How I Met Your Mother (Nobody asked you PATRICE!)
by Animats on 4/27/23, 4:45 PM
by schainks on 4/28/23, 6:09 AM
ChatGPT has gotten us there in writing, and the AI generated vocals are already really close. Unless apple acquires OpenAI, Siri is doomed.
by mark_l_watson on 4/27/23, 6:09 PM
I think that all the deep learning models for handling speech on the Apple Watch are run locally on the watch.
by m3kw9 on 4/27/23, 5:22 PM
by locusofself on 4/27/23, 5:27 PM
by cubefox on 4/27/23, 8:00 PM
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/apples-siri-chief-st...
by falaki on 4/28/23, 6:04 PM
by ubermonkey on 4/27/23, 5:00 PM
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.
by JustSomeNobody on 4/28/23, 12:23 PM
by bparsons on 4/27/23, 4:46 PM
It was a novelty touted as a big leap in technology.
by bsima on 4/28/23, 12:43 PM
by MH15 on 4/27/23, 5:27 PM
by 23B1 on 4/27/23, 6:30 PM
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!
by mixcocam on 4/28/23, 9:31 AM
I have been using it more and more to send email and messages.
by Osiris on 4/28/23, 9:11 AM
Siri’s most common response to me: “You have to unlock your iPhone to do that”. Not helpful.
by gwbas1c on 4/27/23, 8:35 PM
by paracyst on 4/27/23, 6:09 PM
by rednerrus on 4/27/23, 5:42 PM
by knallfrosch on 4/28/23, 8:59 AM
by bdcravens on 4/27/23, 5:48 PM
by rm_-rf_slash on 4/27/23, 4:33 PM
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.
by izzydata on 4/27/23, 5:54 PM
by tremere on 4/30/23, 9:36 AM
by adityathakurxd on 4/27/23, 5:36 PM
by MrFantastic on 4/27/23, 4:52 PM
WebGL has been screwed since 16.4
by csujoy on 4/27/23, 5:37 PM
by mensetmanusman on 4/29/23, 12:40 PM
Siri: let me see what I found on the web about f(misspelling, $any_question?$)
by pcurve on 4/29/23, 4:03 AM
They do a much better job of unifying device experience through software.
by layer8 on 4/27/23, 6:26 PM
> 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-...
by 1letterunixname on 4/28/23, 4:45 PM
by andsoitis on 4/28/23, 5:24 AM
by bricedouglas on 4/27/23, 4:25 PM
by IOT_Apprentice on 4/27/23, 10:58 PM
by CodeWriter23 on 4/27/23, 6:45 PM
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
by SanjayMehta on 4/28/23, 6:28 AM
by neurobama on 4/27/23, 4:30 PM
by 64operator on 4/27/23, 5:38 PM
by alfalfasprout on 4/27/23, 5:45 PM
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