[turblety]

I wonder why Apple can create a model to fold proteins, but still can't get Siri to control the phone competently? I'm not sure I agree with Apple's priorities. I guess these things are not synchronous and they can work on multiple things at a time.

[tanelpoder]

I guess it's because SimpleFold came from a research lab with different autonomy and less competing interests and internal politics...

[frenchie4111]

I am genuinely interested where the strong negativity towards Siri has come from in recent culture. From what I gather it's likely due to the high expectations we have for Apple. But what I don't really get is why is there not a similar amount of negativity being directed at Google or Samsung, who both have equally shit phone AI assistants (obviously this is just from my perspective, I am a daily user of both iOS and a Samsung Android)

I am not trying to defend Apple or Siri by any means. I think the product absolutely should (and will) improve. I am just curious to explore why there is such negativity being directed specifically at Apple's AI assistant.

[xp84]

As a vocal critic of Siri, I can give you a number of reasons we hate it:

1. It seems to be actively getting worse. On a daily basis, I see it responding to queries nonsensically, like when i say “play (song) by (artist)” (I have Apple Music) by opening my Sirius app and putting on a random thing that isn’t even that artist. Other trivial commands are frequently just met with apologies or searching the web.

2. Over a year ago Apple conducted a flashy announcement full of promises about how Siri would not only do the things that it’s been marketed as being able to do for the last decade, but also things that no one has seen an assistant do. Many people believe that announcement was based on fantasy thinking and those people are looking more and more correct every day that Apple ships no actual improvements to Siri.

3. Apple also shipped a visual overhaul of how Siri looks, which gives the impression that work has been done, leading people to be even more disappointed when Siri continues to be a pile of trash.

4. The only competitor that makes sense to compare is Google, since no one else has access to do useful things on your device with your data. At least Google has a clear path to an LLM-based assistant, since they’ve built an LLM. It seems believable that android users will have access to a Gemini-based assistant, whereas it appears to most of us that Apple‘s internal dysfunction has rendered them unable to ship something of that caliber.

[samuelg123]

I think Siri has always been criticized, likely because it has never worked super well and it has the most eyes (or ears) on it (iPhones still have 50% market share in the US).

And now that we have ChatGPT with voice mode, Gemini Live, etc which have incredible speech recognition and reasoning comparatively, it's harder to argue that "every voice assistant is bad" still.

[Invictus0]

For the last three iOS major versions, Siri has been unable to execute the simple command "shuffle the playlist 'Jams'", or any variation, like "play the playlist Jams on shuffle". I am upset for that reason.

[citizenpaul]

Is it just my rosie glasses or did siri work much better in the first couple of years and seem to decline continually since then. I actually used it a lot initially then eventually disabled it as it never worked anymore.

[devmor]

I feel like the same is true of a lot of products that moved from being programmatically connected ML workflows to multi-modal AI.

We, the consumer, have received inferior products because of the vague promise that the company might one day be able to make it cheaper if they invest now.

[SoftTalker]

I've disabled Siri as much as I possibly can. I've never even tried to use it. I would do the same for any other AI assistant. I don't like that they are always listening, and I just don't like talking to computers. I find it unnatural, and I get irrationally angry when they don't understand what I want.

If I could buy a phone without an assistant I would see that as a desirable feature.

[al_borland]

Something like this doesn’t actually have to work. There were no expectations at all in this space.

Meanwhile, people expect perfection from Siri. At this point a new version of Siri will never live up to people’s expectations. Had they released something on-par with ChatGPT, people would hate it and probably file a class action lawsuit against Apple over it.

The entire company isn’t going to work on Siri. In a large company there are a lot of priorities, and some things that happen on the side as well. For all we know this was one person’s weekend project to help learn something new that will later be applied to the priorities.

I’ve made plenty of hobby projects related to work that weren’t important or priorities, but what I learned along the want proved extremely valuable to key deliverables down the road.

[mapmeld]

As I understand it, Siri and Alexa could be plugged into an LLM, but changing it to an "open world" device that can tell your kid something disturbing, text all of your contacts, buy groceries, etc. comes with serious risk of reputational harm. While still falling short of people's expectations if it isn't ChatGPT-quality. OpenAI is new enough that they get to play by different rules.

[EasyMark]

Fair point, even X was able to pump out a usable AI, grok.