Apple Hiring for 'Answers' Team Working on 'ChatGPT-Like Search'

[JulianL]

Oh, so like Google’s knowledge graph?

Welcome to 2012, Apple. Keep skating to where that puck used to be; maybe one day you’ll catch a glimpse of where it is now.

I don’t go that far back but I first started using smart speakers (voice assistants) in 2018 and at that time, after some research, I started out with Google Home devices with Google Assistant (obviously) as the software assistant. Today I still have some of my Google devices active in a few rooms but I mainly use Amazon Alexa devices and I occasionally use Siri on my Apple Watch & iPhone.

The reason I switched away from Google for my primary devices is that Google seemed (and still seems) to have given up on refreshing the hardware, Amazon recognised the wake up word way better than my Google devices & false-triggered way less, and it was way faster to respond.

None of that stuff was LLM based but for basic question answering even back in 2018 Google Assistant was way ahead of Siri today in terms of the specificity with which it could extract intent, the use of context from previous questions (resolving anaphoric references), and formatting specific answers to match the intent. Even today neither Siri nor Alexa can do any of that stuff as well as Google Assistant could do it way back in 2018, or at least that is my anecdotal experience based on my usage of all of these systems over the past few years.

 

[hurley999jb]

💯 Siri is pretty horrid. Issues I have with Siri:

-none of my Apple devices can figure out which should reply and so none do. This happens 25-40% of the time. I see all the screens light up and then go dark without doing anything else.

-“I found this on the web for…” perhaps the most infuriating thing to hear from Siri and this seems to be half the time. Siri should be able to tell me anything I ask it about regarding my iPhone.

-“I’m sorry, I don’t understand” - I get this 10% of the time

-“you’ll have to unlock your iPhone for that”

-Just doesn’t respond sometimes. I can’t figure out why this happens. I have to repeat myself 2,3 or sometimes 4 times.

Same issues, but two males in our house. It doesn't know who is who.

 

[frownface]

snip

Sentiments exactly. Unfortunately they seem more interested in making movies these days than to do anything ground breaking.

 

[LFO8]

A traditional search engine that actively excluded generative slop pages would be far more useful at this point.

Perplexity AI is that search engine. Put's all 'traditional' internet search engines which soley seem to exist anymore to sell you ads to shame.

It's super fast, gives you the sources for reference and you can save any search and article. Apart from just searching for results, the added benefit of the ai in this case is you can tell it to organize information into tables or whatever.

The only thing missing imo is the ability to exclude sources after a query has been performed to then run the query again but with exclusion of the sources you just selected. Should be as simple as check marking in the source list and then hitting 'Re-run' (or something along those lines).

 

[hagar]

It’s glaringly obvious that they’re still fumbling in the dark with no idea what they’re doing. iOS 27? Seriously? Why even bother splurging on a new iPhone this September? This is an absolute train wreck of embarrassment.

Who in their right mind considers buying a new iPhone because of AI? Can’t imagine anyone falling for that marketing trick.