Ask HN: What do people think of Apple's Siri?

[hireshbrem]

I'm curious of what people really think of Siri.

Most of the things I've heard are pretty negative but is it just that Apple can't build a good enough assistant or is that people just don't interacting with one (in this specific way)?

Would love to hear any thoughts!

[al_borland]

I’m not a voice assistant person, so I thought it was fine for what it was, especially historically. I’d mostly just use it to set timers and things.

Right now seems to be an odd time to evaluate it and prompt people to trash it, considering they just announced a complete overhaul coming in the fall that’s currently in a developer beta with a public beta coming next month.

[hireshbrem]

me too, timers are one thing i use it for. i don't know about the overhaul tbh, I think Apple Intelligence is another topic itself but I am curious as to how/what they will do specifically.

I think Apple holding back on AI investment is crazy.

[al_borland]

The announcement, with demos, is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hF8swzNR1-o

Holding back may have been the smartest thing Apple could have done. Instead of racing to win a race, investing hundreds of billions of dollars in the process, they can simply pick the the model winners and integrate it into their existing platforms for pennies on the dollar... and shift that model over time if the winners change. Their hardware was already well positioned, as they had been integrating neural engines into their chips for many years, and people have been buying their hardware like crazy for that. They're selling shovels. So they get the upside, without the cost and risk of trying to win the frontier model race.

With what they announced for the changes in Siri, I'm betting a lot of average AI users will just use Siri instead of bothering with a stand alone AI subscription. They get Gemini, plus integration with all their data, all with better privacy than any of the frontier models are offering directly.

[fdgwhite]

I assume he’s asking about the new Siri. Or else he’s a time traveler

[richstokes]

Pretty bad. It seems to have very limited context, and it mostly cant follow up on things if you have additional things to ask. It was ~fine when it first came out, but seems to have made basically zero progress since then, and frankly feels pretty dumb compared to talking with modern LLM-type apps.

[nexmoe]

I’m also really curious.

I usually prefer using other voice assistants, but Siri is kind of dumb, so I pretty much never use it.

[hireshbrem]

I see. What other voice assistants do you prefer using?

[moomoo11]

call me weird but i never got into voice anything

i don't want to talk out loud to my devices, i just want to turn a dial or press a button and move on. god forbid i have to type.