[eastbound]

> wait to understand what the thing is capable of doing

My parents use Android to ask “What are the 5 biggest towers in Chicago” or “Remove the people on my picture” while apparently iPhone is only capable of doing “Hey Siri start the Chronometer / There is no contact named Chronometer in your phone”.

My iPhone is lagging a ridiculous 10 years behind. It’s just that I don’t trust Google with my credit card.

[Gigachad]

These are software/cloud features. You can install gemini on iphone if you want to talk about towers in Chicago.

The only reason to care about it being OS integrated is to interact with functions of the OS, which siri does fine.

[jeroenhd]

Apple's AI stuff also uses cloud features, though you can't use them on other platforms. The problem with Apple's new cloud features is that they generally just suck. I'm surprised iCloud works so well with how hard they're fumbling basic stuff like this.

[Gigachad]

At least all of the ones I have tried work locally. I’ve entered airplane mode and things like magic eraser in images works fine.

[satvikpendem]

Siri does not do it fine, it's literally the example the above commenter showed.

[dwaite]

Knowing the building heights around Chicago is not an OS feature. Even if Siri was perfect, they still aren't going to ship a wikipedia object graph on every phone.

Likewise, the phone does not understand removing people from a photo. It is a feature specific to the photo app, and Siri allows you to wire in commands for the features in your app just fine and has for years. If Google decided for competitive reasons to not ship this feature to non-Pixel or non-Android users, thats not a Siri fault. That Apple did not integrate this as a voice command into their Photos app is also not a Siri fault (is it really common to remove all people from a photo, vs specific people?)

[satvikpendem]

> Hey Siri start the Chronometer / There is no contact named Chronometer in your phone

Is what I was referring to, Siri often fails at even opening apps which is an OS feature. Regardless, even for your examples at a certain point an AI assistant not being able to do certain things while others can does become the fault of that AI.

[Gigachad]

Just ask for the timer. That's what it's called in iOS. I've never seen someone stuck on this before.

[realusername]

Siri is one step below that for me, it still doesn't understand my accent, I feel like its voice recognition didn't improve from 2010...

[smt88]

"10 years behind" would be an improvement for Siri. It's actively broken much of the time in a way that Google Assistant or Alexa never has been.

[adrithmetiqa]

I would argue that they are as bad as each other. I have to repeat most voice commands to Siri and Alexa than getting it right first time. No experience with Google.

[ghaff]

Voice assistants were going to be this revolutionary new category. I think Amazon was going to populate a whole office tower in Boston with Alexa engineers at one point. There have been incremental improvements here and there but, to a first approximation, none of it has really worked out.

[Barrin92]

I want the reverse version of this, if Apple can promise me to 'lag behind' for another ten years I'll buy my first Apple device in ten years