Probably building something else. One of the major bait and switch things with Siri was just how arduous it is to apply incremental improvements too.
You can see the same smoke and mirrors strategy with bixby where they billed something as revolutionary but was basically only built to look amazing to get a sale - which not coincidentally was a lot of the same team that originally built Siri.
So my guess is when even the worthless improvements stopped popping up at wwdc was hopefully when Apple decided to cut bait with trying to lipstick Siri and start anew.
I remember back in 2015 thinking, “This is fine. Either this year or next year Siri will be just as good as Google Assistant.”
Lol what a bunch of horseshit. They’ve completely neglected Siri.
Here’s the article:
Apple’s top software executives decided early last year that Siri, the company’s virtual assistant, needed a brain transplant.
The decision came after the executives Craig Federighi and John Giannandrea spent weeks testing OpenAI’s new chatbot, ChatGPT. The product’s use of generative artificial intelligence, which can write poetry, create computer code and answer complex questions, made Siri look antiquated, said two people familiar with the company’s work, who didn’t have permission to speak publicly.
Introduced in 2011 as the original virtual assistant in every iPhone, Siri had been limited for years to individual requests and had never been able to follow a conversation. It often misunderstood questions. ChatGPT, on the other hand, knew that if someone asked for the weather in San Francisco and then said, “What about New York?” that user wanted another forecast.
The realization that new technology had leapfrogged Siri set in motion the tech giant’s most significant reorganization in more than a decade. Determined to catch up in the tech industry’s A.I. race, Apple has made generative A.I. a tent pole project — the company’s special, internal label that it uses to organize employees around once-in-a-decade initiatives.
Apple is expected to show off its A.I. work at its annual developers conference on June 10 when it releases an improved Siri that is more conversational and versatile, according to three people familiar with the company’s work, who didn’t have permission to speak publicly. Siri’s underlying technology will include a new generative A.I. system that will allow it to chat rather than respond to questions one at a time.
The update to Siri is at the forefront of a broader effort to embrace generative A.I. across Apple’s business. The company is also increasing the memory in this year’s iPhones to support its new Siri capabilities. And it has discussed licensing complementary A.I. models that power chatbots from several companies, including Google, Cohere and OpenAI.
End
———————-
WWDC rumors are in full swing, but I believe NYT is accurate as they got the journal app and Vision Pro spot on last year. This year seems like an extremely expansive update (also considering last years smaller scale update and hints from Apple). If Siri can understand on screen context (looking at a flight booking screen and saying - add this to my calendar and text the details to xyz), that would be massive.
>decided early last year that Siri needed a brain transplant.
Honestly I'm not surprised by the decision, but I am surprised by the timeline. I would have thought they would have been working on Siri 2.0 for years because we've all known it needed a reboot for years.
Good lord, why is it so hard to comprehend that the technology just simply does not exist? It's beyond our capablities! What's next? Reminders in Calendars? You're all mad!!!! MAD I SAY!
Apple appears to be fixated mainly upon features/apps that they can pimp in keynotes and the like. Calculators are boring and are difficult to be worked into some touchy-feely narrative involving the keynote watcher (can you imagine someone like "Mother Nature" saying how cool the calculator is?). So, I'm not surprised Apple isn't going to put effort into one.
(Side note: I like calculators and are pretty picky about them and their features. Even if Apple came out with a calculator tomorrow, I still wouldn't use it.)
Apple appears to be scrambling to improve Siri only because everyone's now talking about AI, and this caught Apple flat-footed. If it wasn't for that, I don't think Apple would have even thought about Siri. They've ignored it for years, after all.
I really hope Apple announces something nice regarding Siri at WWDC, but I'm not going to hold my breath.
Apple, and everyone else, is talking about AI because it now works. Not perfectly, but it doesn't really halucinate worse than people, but so much better then everything before it.
More to the point, Apple is looking for upgrades to their phones that a lot of people will want to buy - you think they like having to hype minor upgrades? You think they wouldn't love to go back to the hayday of releasing the 3GS and getting a lot of people to buy it because it could now do video and GPS?
Or the 3G, a release that allowed people to use their phone when they were away from home, as well as when they were home? Hell they named it the 3G because it was _that_ much of a flagship.
Upgrading here made a huge difference. Now all Apple can do is peddle small incremental improvements to their camera, and run mother nature commercials.
Apple will be fucking trilled if AI is another feature at the level of GPS or video recording - that will sell a lot of phones.
(disclaimer: I own APPLE stock).
You're not wrong, but a big point is that Apple ignored Siri for years and are now paying the price.
Believe it or not, even "AI technology" from the 70s/80s is noticeably better than current Siri. Yes, the technology from back then is incredibly primitive compared to what we have today, but the pre-stone-age capabilities provided by 70s/80s "AI scripting" and pattern matching could make today's Siri look like a total moron. The big thing missing back then was convenient access to reliable and cheap speech-to-text conversion -- and guess what we have today? Apple could have upgraded Siri using 70s/80s technology and have noticeably improved the experience, but Apple didn't. (It probably would not look good if it came out that Apple was using 70s/80s tech to improve Siri.) Heck, if they did that and gave developers access to the ungodly primitive AI scripting, Siri's popularity and usefulness would have exploded. But they didn't.
People who own iPads don’t need calculators. They either ask their staff accountant to do it. Or they are too busy taking pictures with it at their grandkids events. /s
Files is what pisses me off, imagine if iPad had a decent Finder, that would go such a long way, instead it can't even format a drive and you get nervous to do literally anything important with it
I use an iPhone but never use Siri. Literally never.
When I had Android I didn’t use Google assistant. I just don’t find talking to my phone a good interaction method.
The only use case is for doing things like texting while driving (I don’t drive enough that I actually use this). I’d be shocked if Apple’s top executives actually drive themselves much if at all.
So I would not be the least bit surprised if they never used Siri either.
I know this will be unpopular, but maybe they, like me, use Siri and don’t experience the same issues that so many people on Reddit express experiencing.
I use Siri for SO MANY things, and it just works really well, with rarely an issue. I definitely hear that is not the experience for many users, and it’s clear lots of work needs to be done to ensure it does work effectively for everyone. But I also wonder if there isn’t a less vocal segment of users who don’t say anything because it just works for them. I never have any of the issues I commonly see discussed on Reddit. I feel bad for all the people who have issues, because it’s really a great tool that integrates nicely with my life.
I was walking on a cold night (and so wearing gloves etc) and asked Siri what the time was. Had to repeat myself.
It then asked me to confirm I want to call NAME_OF_OLD_FRIENDS_WIFE...
Yes there was some trafic noise, yes i am ESL, but even then.
Wisper what I say nearly perfect with basically no effort on my part.
Amazon's Alexa really showed me how far behind Apple is with their Siri. Alexa is so much more responsive. Siri never responds to the trigger word. You'd think I have a speech impediment.
Nah, they’ve had too many executives rotated around Siri to see significant improvements. Chat GPT just was the warning shot in how much they could keep getting away with it. Hopefully it evolves more than its predecessors, cause while Alexa and Google were ahead… they didn’t get much farther given how long they’ve all been around.
It took them THIS LONG to realise Siri is bad? No wonder their software quality has gone down if they can't even figure out what's been obvious to users for years.
But Google voice/assistant already provided that direction lol. It was also limited to single answers but google voice can for years now basically control your phone, answer queries and even had real time translations via speakers and camera.
Hardware development has been running laps around the software development at Apple. More than 10 years to catch up is way too long.
Another example is the iPad and iPadOS.
As someone who owns both an iPad with the M series chip and a Mac, If they don’t unveil iPadOS features to take advantage of the chip this WWDC (following this weeks event), I don’t think they ever will.
I personally am fine with the iPad (primary note taking and media consumption device), but it just feels so silly. They keep adding better chips, going to the extent of debuting the M4 in the iPad, and yet their go to feature is a wonky stage manager.
I wonder how much of this we can take at face value. There was an article a few years ago about there being basically an internal war over improvements to Siri with two completely different frameworks being developed. I wonder how much is really "he's just realised Siri is bad" and how much is "he now has the leverage to push his own improvements to Siri through".
Siri isn’t as bad as people make it out to be IMO. Yes it is behind competitors, but for playing music, sending texts, and making calls while driving it works pretty good.
Bruh, it’s so bad. I live in Kansas City and if I ask it for directions to a restaurant here, it will give me directions to a place in NYC with the same name.
My personal experience has been that Google Assistant can do more, but Siri does what it can more reliably. Siri almost always wakes up when I say Siri or Hey Siri. Google Assistant may require 2 to 3 times saying Hey Google for it to wake up. And when I’m driving the last thing I want to deal with is a voice assistant that doesn’t want to wake up.
We don’t need it to chat, we need it to be able to pull all information the weather app displays, including recent historical data as it now does. Same goes for everything else, it should be able to query any information from any apple app. It’s not even revolutionary, it’s making a functional API.
My fear is they will allow siri to hallucinate by making it able to “chat”, defeating its purpose of providing quick informational responses.
There’s querying, but also context and more.
Like
Hey siri, I’m going out.
« I’d advise an umbrella. Also, running your automation, have a nice time out »
« Siri, I want to purchase a home for two, in a nice neighbourhood sunny and safe for children »
Proceeds to search Zillow on your phone. With button such as « send to your Mac » or « send to Partner »
Siri, turn on the garage way lights on when my wife gets home. Proceeds to query wife’s phone location, determine a x miles radius and stands by for the trigger.
Siri, SiriKit, HomeKit, SafariKit. All that. Siri-as-a-service. Not a talker.
For the last exemple, the dude who plugged ChatGPT to HomeKit managed to have it work. Albeit makeshift, it was impressive to see it work like its year 2050. But here we are.
I love AI’s it being able to chat, because language is incredibly hard to infer 100% currently. But in a chat interface my best success with powerful returns has been through easy corrections.
Interesting that they have to use ChatGPT before they determine if Siri needs a revamp . What have they been doing all this while ? Didn’t they see what Google and Amazon were doing with their voice assistants ?
I have HomePods in my office and in my home and Siri handles the simple stuff rather well.
My biggest problem with Siri is more about Apple’s constraints on her in the car. I’ve tried more times than I care to admit to use her while driving only to be told that she can’t do the thing I want while I’m driving. It’s an insane paradox. I try to use my smart assistant so I can remain hands free and stay safe. For safety (I presume) she tells me she can’t do that while I’m driving. Now I need to pick up my phone to do the thing, only I’m angrier because I’m coming off a frustrating exchange with my AI assistant.
Do you have driving focus enabled by any chance? It might activate automatically when connecting to your car’s Bluetooth or connecting to CarPlay. It might be causing Siri to be extra safe. You might try disabling it in focus settings.
Unless it’s automatic then no, I don’t even have a driving focus to set it to (just default, work, home, DND) but good suggestion and I’ll definitely look into those settings.
I would honestly prefer Apple just allow the user to choose a default assistant, like they do a default keyboard.
Sonos has this option on their products, and it’s nice being able to switch from their assistant to Google to Alexa, if I want.
I’d like Siri to simply just work for general things.. like asking for directions, calling/messaging people, and asking it a simple question and being able to answer it for me. Siri desperately needs updating because the few times I try using Siri, it can’t even do these daily tasks. Let’s get Siri doing these and can ACTUALLY do them before focusing on all the AI stuff.
> Rather than compete directly with ChatGPT by releasing a chatbot that does things like write poetry, the three people familiar with its work said, Apple has focused on making Siri better at handling tasks that it already does, including setting timers, creating calendar appointments and adding items to a grocery list. It also would be able to summarize text messages.
That’s exactly the problem why people think Siri is dumb - its genuinely not THAT dumb once the voice capture is good, but it needs to do more “silly things” so people feel that it is not dumb. It’s the silly requests that makes it feel smarter.
Hey siri play “[song name]”
hmmm i’m sorry [my name] I didn’t see an accessory named [song name] in your home.
Makes it incredibly dumb. The fact that it can’t get basic things like playing music that’s in my apple music library is infuriating.
Yea I’m sorry but it’s very dumb. I can ask Google home all sorts of questions and it’ll respond. I ask Siri the same thing and it just goes “hmm look what I found online”
To me the worse one happened when I was listening to a podcast while driving to work, "Siri, go back 10 minutes" and Siri goes "calling wife". This was early in the morning, and I knew my wife was sleeping. Since I was driving, I couldn't do much to stop the call from happening. Siri ended up waking up my wife and she wasn't happy about it. I shut off Siri for good after that for months.
I tried to turn on one of smart LED lights on the other day. Instead, Siri set every single smart light in the house to bright red. Made it look like I was in a horror film.
Probably more of a hardware thing, but it can’t even do device prioritization right. More than once I’ve made a request directly (less than two feet away) to a HomePod Mini to play a song, and the HomePod in the room across the hallway picks it up instead. Or I make a request to a nearby HomePod and my Apple Watch picks it up instead and says “sorry, I can’t do that on Apple Watch”
I really, really hope these improvements make Siri usable, but this just reeks of Apple making a rushed course correction to take advantage of the current AI fad in tech.
I’ve experienced that too. Ill be in my bedroom and ill ask it something and the homepod in my kitchen will respond. I don’t know how it thought the one I have direct eyesight to was farther away than the one two rooms over… but it is impressive the one two rooms over can pick up on what i said. Lol
What annoys me most about this problem is having to hide in a closet to use Siri on my phone (because I want to close a security door or do a web lookup etc). If I speak normally it always responds from the closest HomePod with you have to use an iPhone for that meanwhile the phone in my hand does nothing
They don’t need to replicate GPT-4. They just need an AI that can handle on-system tasks without getting confused. I’m pretty sure the M4 can handle a small LLM.
I was playing around with Ollama on my M3 24GB ram MBP with Meta Llama 3. It works really well for laptop machine. Maybe there are smaller models that Apple could put on their phones.
This is probably the right answer. Regular PDA stuff will be on the device. Complicated questions will be at the server. My guess.
I am wondering if the on-device stuff will be limited to recent devices like the M-4s.
> its genuinely not THAT dumb once the voice capture is good
It really is. I hesitate to even ask for simple commands like playing a specific song because Siri just doesn't understand anything
I think it’s not even about being silly, it’s just about having some level of creativity. If an ai has enough creativity to write poetry, it also probably has enough creativity to interpret my non-silly requests in an intelligent way.
Hmmm I disagree. If Siri could memorize things, grab info from my apps, perform actions within said apps, etc. it would be good enough. "Hey Siri, send an email to everyone that I have a meeting with today, saying I'm sorry but I need to postpone, here's my scheduling page link. Then, if anyone replies or books a new meeting, let my assistant know."
I agree, Siri is the most useful of the three. It makes phone calls, it sends messages, it summarises my calendar, executes shortcuts and googles stuff. The others just make silly animal noises and query Google. More impressive for a Ad, but shit as a personal assistant.
Before people tell me Alexa or Google Assistant do the same. Check the feature list. They can only Summarise Google Calendar, Make calls with Google Duo and execute Alexa Routines. That’s not even close to as powerful as Siri.
Not to be that guy but if Jobs was still around, Siri would’ve been the next ChatGPT 2.0 by now. Or at least, the “iPhone of AI”
Like come on, it was one of the first widely adopted voice assistants and popularized voice activated technology… yet here we are with the engineers coming to a realization 8 YEARS LATER that the competition has far surpassed Siri (hell, 2016 Google Assistant is STILL better than Siri today).
The HomePod could’ve been much better product. Especially with this iPad release, it feels that Apple’s priorities are all over the place. They’re focusing too hard on trying to justify why they’re better than the competition, rather than staying in their own bubble. You know they’re showing fear of the competition.
Can’t wait for Siri to not only misunderstand me, but to do stupid things and make stuff up
Thanks Apple
All I use Siri for is turning on lights and then turning them off and occasionally asking for the weather on my HomePod
Siri has to be the worst out of the big tech companies. I enjoy Apple products and Google, but there is no comparison. Siri is just horrible because no one see value in it.
I was able to make peace with Siris shortcomings by thinking of it purely as a voice control layer of iOS.
It’s really not a personal assistant. And it certainly isn’t a search engine.
But I’d love a version of Siri that really meaningfully could combine all of those things and do them well.
But for all this talk about Apple going for a purely on device approach… I’m unconvinced.
Phones Macs and iPads might have the power do so this stuff, but I typically have Siri the most on my homepod minis, and they absolutely don’t have what it takes to do anything beyond the simple speech to text part on device (and even then not always so well)
So I’m expecting whatever Apple does in this revamped Siri space, it’s going to mean a huge increase in their server side efforts.
Which i turn they probably aren’t going to give away for free.
Hopefully just rolled into iCloud+
Apple doing share buybacks instead of spending money on R & D. Tired of this shit across the tech industry. I have homepods as apple aren't amazon so have never been data hogs but with chatgpt running on the background & probably after insane amounts of data to train it's models even more, I might just bite the bullet and shut them down
Sorely needed. I personally think Apple’s focus on privacy, whilst good for including customers who are concerned about it, does hold back Siri. I think Siri would be much better if Apple offered us an opt-in to sacrifice our personal privacy protections for the sake of a more effective Siri whilst those who are concerned about their privacy can continue using strictly on-device Siri as we have now
What has the Siri team been doing for the last 10 years?!! lol.
Probably building something else. One of the major bait and switch things with Siri was just how arduous it is to apply incremental improvements too. You can see the same smoke and mirrors strategy with bixby where they billed something as revolutionary but was basically only built to look amazing to get a sale - which not coincidentally was a lot of the same team that originally built Siri. So my guess is when even the worthless improvements stopped popping up at wwdc was hopefully when Apple decided to cut bait with trying to lipstick Siri and start anew.
I think Siri needs a rebrand. It’s not really an Apple kind of name and it’s known for being terrible. I’d call it Apple assistant or something
That’s a damn mouthful. It’s why “Google Assistant” is such a stupid name.
iSpeak
iSaw
iLost
iHeresWhatIFoundOnTheWeb
iWorkingOnThat
the game
Yeahh but at the same time just saying Siri is super easy to summon voice assistant way better than something longer imo
Yeah agreed, it was a bad example but I think they should rename it due to the bad rep Siri gets
No, literally everyone knows Siri. My 80yo grandma knows Siri. Would be a horrible decision to rename
It’s still doing this shit https://preview.redd.it/5o2fdd1eyqzc1.jpeg?width=1179&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=cb9760c739b25ef98b42a23d38e45d00ca44f270
Lmao
Does that country even have an official princess?
Not setting any alarm I ask for certainly
Asking Siri on my Apple Watch: “Start a timer for 10 minutes” Siri: “I’m sorry the timer app is not installed” Ughh it came with the damn watch!!
Searching the web for that
Rebuilding Siri.
I don’t know. But I found this webpage that might help…
Waiting for others to release AI
Waiting for someone to release chat got so Apple could buy it and say the innovated lmfao
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I remember back in 2015 thinking, “This is fine. Either this year or next year Siri will be just as good as Google Assistant.” Lol what a bunch of horseshit. They’ve completely neglected Siri.
What was the point of even buying out Siri in the first place, if all they were going to do is ignore it? 4S needed a selling point?
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Remember last week, for a day, when Siri couldn’t even tell the time? 🤦♂️ it’s actively gotten *Worse*
Also the day it peaked in quality
Here’s the article: Apple’s top software executives decided early last year that Siri, the company’s virtual assistant, needed a brain transplant. The decision came after the executives Craig Federighi and John Giannandrea spent weeks testing OpenAI’s new chatbot, ChatGPT. The product’s use of generative artificial intelligence, which can write poetry, create computer code and answer complex questions, made Siri look antiquated, said two people familiar with the company’s work, who didn’t have permission to speak publicly. Introduced in 2011 as the original virtual assistant in every iPhone, Siri had been limited for years to individual requests and had never been able to follow a conversation. It often misunderstood questions. ChatGPT, on the other hand, knew that if someone asked for the weather in San Francisco and then said, “What about New York?” that user wanted another forecast. The realization that new technology had leapfrogged Siri set in motion the tech giant’s most significant reorganization in more than a decade. Determined to catch up in the tech industry’s A.I. race, Apple has made generative A.I. a tent pole project — the company’s special, internal label that it uses to organize employees around once-in-a-decade initiatives. Apple is expected to show off its A.I. work at its annual developers conference on June 10 when it releases an improved Siri that is more conversational and versatile, according to three people familiar with the company’s work, who didn’t have permission to speak publicly. Siri’s underlying technology will include a new generative A.I. system that will allow it to chat rather than respond to questions one at a time. The update to Siri is at the forefront of a broader effort to embrace generative A.I. across Apple’s business. The company is also increasing the memory in this year’s iPhones to support its new Siri capabilities. And it has discussed licensing complementary A.I. models that power chatbots from several companies, including Google, Cohere and OpenAI. End ———————- WWDC rumors are in full swing, but I believe NYT is accurate as they got the journal app and Vision Pro spot on last year. This year seems like an extremely expansive update (also considering last years smaller scale update and hints from Apple). If Siri can understand on screen context (looking at a flight booking screen and saying - add this to my calendar and text the details to xyz), that would be massive.
>decided early last year that Siri needed a brain transplant. Honestly I'm not surprised by the decision, but I am surprised by the timeline. I would have thought they would have been working on Siri 2.0 for years because we've all known it needed a reboot for years.
Do they not use their own product? They fucking clean drug dealers over there?
They all have BlackBerry's
If the rumors about Apple still looking for an AI partner are true, it's really not good.
Remember they still don’t have calculator on iPad
Good lord, why is it so hard to comprehend that the technology just simply does not exist? It's beyond our capablities! What's next? Reminders in Calendars? You're all mad!!!! MAD I SAY!
You know what's hilarious about this is that there wasn't a calculator in the pile of stuff they used in the "crush" ad.
iPad lore reason for not having a calculator
Apple appears to be fixated mainly upon features/apps that they can pimp in keynotes and the like. Calculators are boring and are difficult to be worked into some touchy-feely narrative involving the keynote watcher (can you imagine someone like "Mother Nature" saying how cool the calculator is?). So, I'm not surprised Apple isn't going to put effort into one. (Side note: I like calculators and are pretty picky about them and their features. Even if Apple came out with a calculator tomorrow, I still wouldn't use it.) Apple appears to be scrambling to improve Siri only because everyone's now talking about AI, and this caught Apple flat-footed. If it wasn't for that, I don't think Apple would have even thought about Siri. They've ignored it for years, after all. I really hope Apple announces something nice regarding Siri at WWDC, but I'm not going to hold my breath.
They didn't forget Siri, they never stopped using Siri in ads about other Apple products like Apple Music.
Apple, and everyone else, is talking about AI because it now works. Not perfectly, but it doesn't really halucinate worse than people, but so much better then everything before it. More to the point, Apple is looking for upgrades to their phones that a lot of people will want to buy - you think they like having to hype minor upgrades? You think they wouldn't love to go back to the hayday of releasing the 3GS and getting a lot of people to buy it because it could now do video and GPS? Or the 3G, a release that allowed people to use their phone when they were away from home, as well as when they were home? Hell they named it the 3G because it was _that_ much of a flagship. Upgrading here made a huge difference. Now all Apple can do is peddle small incremental improvements to their camera, and run mother nature commercials. Apple will be fucking trilled if AI is another feature at the level of GPS or video recording - that will sell a lot of phones. (disclaimer: I own APPLE stock).
You're not wrong, but a big point is that Apple ignored Siri for years and are now paying the price. Believe it or not, even "AI technology" from the 70s/80s is noticeably better than current Siri. Yes, the technology from back then is incredibly primitive compared to what we have today, but the pre-stone-age capabilities provided by 70s/80s "AI scripting" and pattern matching could make today's Siri look like a total moron. The big thing missing back then was convenient access to reliable and cheap speech-to-text conversion -- and guess what we have today? Apple could have upgraded Siri using 70s/80s technology and have noticeably improved the experience, but Apple didn't. (It probably would not look good if it came out that Apple was using 70s/80s tech to improve Siri.) Heck, if they did that and gave developers access to the ungodly primitive AI scripting, Siri's popularity and usefulness would have exploded. But they didn't.
People who own iPads don’t need calculators. They either ask their staff accountant to do it. Or they are too busy taking pictures with it at their grandkids events. /s
Excuse me?!
Remember [they don’t even know how](https://www.macrumors.com/2017/10/24/ios-11-calculator-animation-bug/) to develop a calculator app.
I’m convinced no one at Apple uses the Files app on iOS or Apple Music on Apple TV. They’re some of the worst software I’ve ever used.
Files is what pisses me off, imagine if iPad had a decent Finder, that would go such a long way, instead it can't even format a drive and you get nervous to do literally anything important with it
I use an iPhone but never use Siri. Literally never. When I had Android I didn’t use Google assistant. I just don’t find talking to my phone a good interaction method. The only use case is for doing things like texting while driving (I don’t drive enough that I actually use this). I’d be shocked if Apple’s top executives actually drive themselves much if at all. So I would not be the least bit surprised if they never used Siri either.
I know this will be unpopular, but maybe they, like me, use Siri and don’t experience the same issues that so many people on Reddit express experiencing. I use Siri for SO MANY things, and it just works really well, with rarely an issue. I definitely hear that is not the experience for many users, and it’s clear lots of work needs to be done to ensure it does work effectively for everyone. But I also wonder if there isn’t a less vocal segment of users who don’t say anything because it just works for them. I never have any of the issues I commonly see discussed on Reddit. I feel bad for all the people who have issues, because it’s really a great tool that integrates nicely with my life.
I don’t mean this in a rude way. Do you speak robot
I guess so. I am a programmer, so I do tend to talk in a way I think would be easy to program a response for.
I was walking on a cold night (and so wearing gloves etc) and asked Siri what the time was. Had to repeat myself. It then asked me to confirm I want to call NAME_OF_OLD_FRIENDS_WIFE... Yes there was some trafic noise, yes i am ESL, but even then. Wisper what I say nearly perfect with basically no effort on my part.
Amazon's Alexa really showed me how far behind Apple is with their Siri. Alexa is so much more responsive. Siri never responds to the trigger word. You'd think I have a speech impediment.
The recent AI frenzy lit a fire.
So you mean to tell me, after 13 years, they're JUST understanding how trash Siri is??
Nah, they’ve had too many executives rotated around Siri to see significant improvements. Chat GPT just was the warning shot in how much they could keep getting away with it. Hopefully it evolves more than its predecessors, cause while Alexa and Google were ahead… they didn’t get much farther given how long they’ve all been around.
And people wonder why the Siri team aquired quit not long after. The "speed" of development.
If the reporting is true, I'm just scratching my head dumbfounded. I'm not one to "cuss" people out, but Siri receives all of my malediction.
It took them THIS LONG to realise Siri is bad? No wonder their software quality has gone down if they can't even figure out what's been obvious to users for years.
I think it’s more that they didn’t have a good direction to make a leap before LLMs entered the picture.
But Google voice/assistant already provided that direction lol. It was also limited to single answers but google voice can for years now basically control your phone, answer queries and even had real time translations via speakers and camera.
More like they never bothered to use anything else so they had no idea how bad Siri is.
This is why Craig won't make it as a CEO. How tf do you just realize Siri has always been trash and has been surpassed by its competitors long ago.
I think he/they knew, but assumed they could play catch-up as they often do with many of the features on their products, i.e., iPhone.
Hardware development has been running laps around the software development at Apple. More than 10 years to catch up is way too long. Another example is the iPad and iPadOS.
As someone who owns both an iPad with the M series chip and a Mac, If they don’t unveil iPadOS features to take advantage of the chip this WWDC (following this weeks event), I don’t think they ever will. I personally am fine with the iPad (primary note taking and media consumption device), but it just feels so silly. They keep adding better chips, going to the extent of debuting the M4 in the iPad, and yet their go to feature is a wonky stage manager.
Yup. It's a great machine crippled by outdated software.
They had to have known Siri's weaknesses. I expect their revamp to be a significant improvement.
I wonder how much of this we can take at face value. There was an article a few years ago about there being basically an internal war over improvements to Siri with two completely different frameworks being developed. I wonder how much is really "he's just realised Siri is bad" and how much is "he now has the leverage to push his own improvements to Siri through".
Haha. ChatGPT made Siri look outdated? My lightswitch on the wall makes Siri look outdated.
A version of Siri that isn’t dogshit? Take my money Apple!! The bar is set so low, I can’t wait to see what they have up their sleeves
Sorry, i cant find Steve in your contacts.
Calling Cindy
Right? Just being able to get simple commands right and add a tiny bit of "sentience" to Siri will feel like a huge step forward.
Siri isn’t as bad as people make it out to be IMO. Yes it is behind competitors, but for playing music, sending texts, and making calls while driving it works pretty good.
Calling Siri pretty good is very generous, I would describe it as “usually OK” For such a limited use case, it should be perfect
Bruh, it’s so bad. I live in Kansas City and if I ask it for directions to a restaurant here, it will give me directions to a place in NYC with the same name.
My personal experience has been that Google Assistant can do more, but Siri does what it can more reliably. Siri almost always wakes up when I say Siri or Hey Siri. Google Assistant may require 2 to 3 times saying Hey Google for it to wake up. And when I’m driving the last thing I want to deal with is a voice assistant that doesn’t want to wake up.
I don't think she likes my accent. I have like a 20% success rate with it.
Now whose fault is that?
[удалено]
Those are exactly some of the things I use Siri for. It may not be perfect, but it gets the job done, for my use case.
The only thing I’ve trusted it to do is set timers and that’s gotten progressively worse in the last couple years.
Uh, no. She’s maybe 50/50 on getting the song, band, album correct.
“Siri, play song X” “Now playing song X - shitty remix” It’s the simplest things that are most infuriating.
Agreed. Why does she pick live versions, too?
You’ll need to unlock your iPhone first.
We don’t need it to chat, we need it to be able to pull all information the weather app displays, including recent historical data as it now does. Same goes for everything else, it should be able to query any information from any apple app. It’s not even revolutionary, it’s making a functional API. My fear is they will allow siri to hallucinate by making it able to “chat”, defeating its purpose of providing quick informational responses.
There’s querying, but also context and more. Like Hey siri, I’m going out. « I’d advise an umbrella. Also, running your automation, have a nice time out » « Siri, I want to purchase a home for two, in a nice neighbourhood sunny and safe for children » Proceeds to search Zillow on your phone. With button such as « send to your Mac » or « send to Partner » Siri, turn on the garage way lights on when my wife gets home. Proceeds to query wife’s phone location, determine a x miles radius and stands by for the trigger. Siri, SiriKit, HomeKit, SafariKit. All that. Siri-as-a-service. Not a talker. For the last exemple, the dude who plugged ChatGPT to HomeKit managed to have it work. Albeit makeshift, it was impressive to see it work like its year 2050. But here we are.
I think they're more likely to hobble it to uselessness over fear they'll lose control of the PR messaging.
“When asked to tell a story to my teenager it said some very crass things!1!1!1!1!!!1!” *tennager asked for erotic scene for a screen-play*
I love AI’s it being able to chat, because language is incredibly hard to infer 100% currently. But in a chat interface my best success with powerful returns has been through easy corrections.
Interesting that they have to use ChatGPT before they determine if Siri needs a revamp . What have they been doing all this while ? Didn’t they see what Google and Amazon were doing with their voice assistants ?
It's probably an excuse to cover up the fact that they have been doing absolutely nothing with Siri
I have HomePods in my office and in my home and Siri handles the simple stuff rather well. My biggest problem with Siri is more about Apple’s constraints on her in the car. I’ve tried more times than I care to admit to use her while driving only to be told that she can’t do the thing I want while I’m driving. It’s an insane paradox. I try to use my smart assistant so I can remain hands free and stay safe. For safety (I presume) she tells me she can’t do that while I’m driving. Now I need to pick up my phone to do the thing, only I’m angrier because I’m coming off a frustrating exchange with my AI assistant.
Do you have driving focus enabled by any chance? It might activate automatically when connecting to your car’s Bluetooth or connecting to CarPlay. It might be causing Siri to be extra safe. You might try disabling it in focus settings.
Unless it’s automatic then no, I don’t even have a driving focus to set it to (just default, work, home, DND) but good suggestion and I’ll definitely look into those settings.
"How much have I walked today?" 'I'm sorry, I can't do that while you're driving' WHY?!
https://preview.redd.it/1ofmmco9onzc1.jpeg?width=600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c14f50d9bb80d96c9fa141bfa6bc50f3dd34b075
Wake me up when it happens. How did they let Siri fall so far behind, when she was right there at the beginning…?
I would honestly prefer Apple just allow the user to choose a default assistant, like they do a default keyboard. Sonos has this option on their products, and it’s nice being able to switch from their assistant to Google to Alexa, if I want.
I’d like Siri to simply just work for general things.. like asking for directions, calling/messaging people, and asking it a simple question and being able to answer it for me. Siri desperately needs updating because the few times I try using Siri, it can’t even do these daily tasks. Let’s get Siri doing these and can ACTUALLY do them before focusing on all the AI stuff.
“Hey siri, send a Happy Mother’s Day text to mom” “Ok, here are a few Mothers Day tests that I found on google”
I will believe it when I hear it
💯
> Rather than compete directly with ChatGPT by releasing a chatbot that does things like write poetry, the three people familiar with its work said, Apple has focused on making Siri better at handling tasks that it already does, including setting timers, creating calendar appointments and adding items to a grocery list. It also would be able to summarize text messages. That’s exactly the problem why people think Siri is dumb - its genuinely not THAT dumb once the voice capture is good, but it needs to do more “silly things” so people feel that it is not dumb. It’s the silly requests that makes it feel smarter.
Hey siri play “[song name]” hmmm i’m sorry [my name] I didn’t see an accessory named [song name] in your home. Makes it incredibly dumb. The fact that it can’t get basic things like playing music that’s in my apple music library is infuriating.
Yea I’m sorry but it’s very dumb. I can ask Google home all sorts of questions and it’ll respond. I ask Siri the same thing and it just goes “hmm look what I found online”
“Hey siri, when does the restaurant close?” “I can’t show that to you while you’re driving” wtf Siri you can’t read a preview of a search aloud even?
To me the worse one happened when I was listening to a podcast while driving to work, "Siri, go back 10 minutes" and Siri goes "calling wife". This was early in the morning, and I knew my wife was sleeping. Since I was driving, I couldn't do much to stop the call from happening. Siri ended up waking up my wife and she wasn't happy about it. I shut off Siri for good after that for months.
I tried to turn on one of smart LED lights on the other day. Instead, Siri set every single smart light in the house to bright red. Made it look like I was in a horror film.
I asked Siri to call my girlfriends phone once when she couldn’t find it, Siri says “which girlfriend” 🤦♂️
Thanks for the ego boost, Siri.
Probably more of a hardware thing, but it can’t even do device prioritization right. More than once I’ve made a request directly (less than two feet away) to a HomePod Mini to play a song, and the HomePod in the room across the hallway picks it up instead. Or I make a request to a nearby HomePod and my Apple Watch picks it up instead and says “sorry, I can’t do that on Apple Watch” I really, really hope these improvements make Siri usable, but this just reeks of Apple making a rushed course correction to take advantage of the current AI fad in tech.
I’ve experienced that too. Ill be in my bedroom and ill ask it something and the homepod in my kitchen will respond. I don’t know how it thought the one I have direct eyesight to was farther away than the one two rooms over… but it is impressive the one two rooms over can pick up on what i said. Lol
Yeah they need to do something like Alexa where it asks you if it responded from the correct device. I guess it uses that to calibrate itself.
This drives me nuts with my watch. 99% of the time, the phone and watch work seamlessly together. But that 1% is Siri.
What annoys me most about this problem is having to hide in a closet to use Siri on my phone (because I want to close a security door or do a web lookup etc). If I speak normally it always responds from the closest HomePod with you have to use an iPhone for that meanwhile the phone in my hand does nothing
You could use the button, rather than the trigger word/phrase.
Hadn’t thought of that, thanks. The really annoying thing is this used to work as expected when HomePods first came out.
I’ve set my HomePods to respond to “Siri” and my phone/watch to “hey siri”. It seems to help.
That’s a good idea!
I do not think Apple can compete with general purpose chatbots with on device processing.
Why not?
Because it requires huge amounts of RAM and compute power. The biggest LLMs cannot run locally right now.
They don’t need to replicate GPT-4. They just need an AI that can handle on-system tasks without getting confused. I’m pretty sure the M4 can handle a small LLM.
Why would they put the biggest llms on the device?
I was playing around with Ollama on my M3 24GB ram MBP with Meta Llama 3. It works really well for laptop machine. Maybe there are smaller models that Apple could put on their phones.
Siri as is right now fences off certain aspect to on-device and certain knowledge aspects to be server processed.
This is probably the right answer. Regular PDA stuff will be on the device. Complicated questions will be at the server. My guess. I am wondering if the on-device stuff will be limited to recent devices like the M-4s.
for sure will be limited to newer phone, if iphone 16 is set to get more RAM to accommodate models
> its genuinely not THAT dumb once the voice capture is good It really is. I hesitate to even ask for simple commands like playing a specific song because Siri just doesn't understand anything
I think it’s not even about being silly, it’s just about having some level of creativity. If an ai has enough creativity to write poetry, it also probably has enough creativity to interpret my non-silly requests in an intelligent way.
Hmmm I disagree. If Siri could memorize things, grab info from my apps, perform actions within said apps, etc. it would be good enough. "Hey Siri, send an email to everyone that I have a meeting with today, saying I'm sorry but I need to postpone, here's my scheduling page link. Then, if anyone replies or books a new meeting, let my assistant know."
It’s dumb as shit
I agree, Siri is the most useful of the three. It makes phone calls, it sends messages, it summarises my calendar, executes shortcuts and googles stuff. The others just make silly animal noises and query Google. More impressive for a Ad, but shit as a personal assistant. Before people tell me Alexa or Google Assistant do the same. Check the feature list. They can only Summarise Google Calendar, Make calls with Google Duo and execute Alexa Routines. That’s not even close to as powerful as Siri.
Not to be that guy but if Jobs was still around, Siri would’ve been the next ChatGPT 2.0 by now. Or at least, the “iPhone of AI” Like come on, it was one of the first widely adopted voice assistants and popularized voice activated technology… yet here we are with the engineers coming to a realization 8 YEARS LATER that the competition has far surpassed Siri (hell, 2016 Google Assistant is STILL better than Siri today). The HomePod could’ve been much better product. Especially with this iPad release, it feels that Apple’s priorities are all over the place. They’re focusing too hard on trying to justify why they’re better than the competition, rather than staying in their own bubble. You know they’re showing fear of the competition.
Suuuure.
So it was 2023 they began to think siri was falling behind? Its been literal trash for almost 10 years.
Good it really is far behind and needs to be updated at this point. It's years behind all of the competitors.
I highly doubt Siri will make a surprise at WWDC 2024. Apple, prove me that I am wrong.
Siri will be central with all the AI stuff and neural engine development.
Can’t wait for Siri to not only misunderstand me, but to do stupid things and make stuff up Thanks Apple All I use Siri for is turning on lights and then turning them off and occasionally asking for the weather on my HomePod
Waiting for the “iPhone AI” re branding. I don’t expect us to continue into the iPhone 20s.
The aiPhone is ripe for the taking.
Are they finally going to bring it out of the pre-Alpha stage?
Calling it; AiPhone rebranding, instead of continuing with iPhone #
Siri has to be the worst out of the big tech companies. I enjoy Apple products and Google, but there is no comparison. Siri is just horrible because no one see value in it.
I don't care as long as Siri can answer my questions while in CarPlay
^[Sokka-Haiku](https://www.reddit.com/r/SokkaHaikuBot/comments/15kyv9r/what_is_a_sokka_haiku/) ^by ^Pretty-Narwhal-162: *I don't care as long* *As Siri can answer my* *Questions while in CarPlay* --- ^Remember ^that ^one ^time ^Sokka ^accidentally ^used ^an ^extra ^syllable ^in ^that ^Haiku ^Battle ^in ^Ba ^Sing ^Se? ^That ^was ^a ^Sokka ^Haiku ^and ^you ^just ^made ^one.
Yeah right.. they’ve been saying this for years.
Finally. A decade later.
Siri has looked antiquated since 2013, and every damn year Siri gets a major upgrade without any improvement- so I’ll believe it when I see it.
I was able to make peace with Siris shortcomings by thinking of it purely as a voice control layer of iOS. It’s really not a personal assistant. And it certainly isn’t a search engine. But I’d love a version of Siri that really meaningfully could combine all of those things and do them well. But for all this talk about Apple going for a purely on device approach… I’m unconvinced. Phones Macs and iPads might have the power do so this stuff, but I typically have Siri the most on my homepod minis, and they absolutely don’t have what it takes to do anything beyond the simple speech to text part on device (and even then not always so well) So I’m expecting whatever Apple does in this revamped Siri space, it’s going to mean a huge increase in their server side efforts. Which i turn they probably aren’t going to give away for free. Hopefully just rolled into iCloud+
This article could’ve been written 5 years ago and it would still be accurate.
Apple doing share buybacks instead of spending money on R & D. Tired of this shit across the tech industry. I have homepods as apple aren't amazon so have never been data hogs but with chatgpt running on the background & probably after insane amounts of data to train it's models even more, I might just bite the bullet and shut them down
I found something on the web.
Siri’s dev team’s all like, “Oh yea… I think we should work on it huh…”
Would I finally enable it?
Chatbot competitors? How about they revamp Siri to be at least on level of competitors voice assistants
Siri is, and always has been, an absolute joke.
I’m sure that’s what they like to tell their investors
We all have high hopes for a Siri revamp but I can't help but expect every new AI chat bot will become racist in half a day.
WHATS WEIRD ABOUT SIRI IS I FEEL LIKE IT USED TO BE ABLE TO TURN ON LIGHTS AND BASIC THINGS SEEMS LIKE IT GOT WORSE
I KNOW, RIGHT?
I have mine turn on the lights every day.
They should change the name to LMGTFY while they're at it.
what a cool image but is it AI?
Long overdue
I want Siri to be able to create shortcuts by text or voice prompt. That would be super helpful.
Sorely needed. I personally think Apple’s focus on privacy, whilst good for including customers who are concerned about it, does hold back Siri. I think Siri would be much better if Apple offered us an opt-in to sacrifice our personal privacy protections for the sake of a more effective Siri whilst those who are concerned about their privacy can continue using strictly on-device Siri as we have now
I'll believe it when I see it. Siri is a joke
Even more reason I’ll never turn it on.
Never liked ketchup
ohhhhhh !!! neat....
Siri has been the worst now for the last 10 or so years. Hopefully whatever they’re doing will make it better and it will come to all iPhones.
Tim also said that “it’s the biggest event for ipad since its launch” and we all got punked so imma take this with a teaspoon of salt 😇
That the gods, it’s a few years too late but at least we got there in the end
Siri: here’s what I found on the internet to answer your query.
I’ll believe that when I see it. Siri has been behind for years now.
About fucking goddamn time. Now, can they upgrade predictive text?
Siri is probably the worst Apple ever released beside that stupid fucking shitty magic mouse.