Apple Says Personalized Siri Features Shown at WWDC Last Year Were 'Real' and 'Working'

[Martin Bland]

I think it’s important to remember that Apple has a much higher quality bar to meet with MacOS/iOS AI integration.

When ChatGPT hallucinates a response about putting glue on pizza, people laugh at the silly AI and quickly forget about it. There is an acceptance that LLMs hallucinate sometimes. It is considered harmless because it is in a chat window that needs to be explicitly used. It is not considered personal, and is accepted as experimental.

Using a potentially hallucinating AI to manage your calendar, contacts, email, and other personal items is a disaster waiting to happen. Nobody wants a hallucinating AI touching their personal stuff (a lot like nobody wanted mandatory U2 in their music library). A clear example of this problem is the paroxysms of public outrage that occurred when Apple’s AI made some mistakes with news summaries. Nobody expresses such outrage when ChatGPT makes chat summarization mistakes. Most people don’t even notice.

Apple is being subjected to a double standard with regards to AI. Not because of animosity towards Apple. Because Apple needs to apply AI to everyone’s personal items, where people’s tolerance for errors is practically zero.

 

[Bryan Bowler]

Regardless, Apple’s development and progress on AI was not even remotely close to being anything useful, let alone competitive. I can honestly say that Apple Intelligence in its current form does nothing for me. The image generation tool is bad. 75% of the features they said were coming to the all-new iPhone 16 series never happened. And even the AI summaries are completely off the mark. At first, reading them was funny because of all the stuff they got wrong…but then they started annoying me when it was giving me disparaging information that didn’t exist. It one time told me my wife was in the hospital when my wife sent me a text message about an acquaintance that went into the hospital.

A couple months ago I realized it did nothing for me and was only slowing me down, so I turned it all off.

 

[citysnaps]

No one, even here in this thread, is crucifying anyone. Check your hyperbole.

No need to check anything. The person I quoted is using the word as an *idiom*.

 

[deathcab]

Apple doesn't show off demoware products. Period. No exceptions.

Completely unrelated, but has anyone else's AirPower been overheating lately?

 

[johnsawyercjs]

Siri is now a toxic brand for Apple and they would be wise to name their AI assistant something else. I want Tim Apple to take Siri to the back of his barn and shoot it.

What if it were renamed to "Tim"?

 

[svish]

Hopefully whenever it launches finally it will be working properly and is beneficial. Will see the video soon.

 

[TracesOfArsenic]

The comments here are unreal — they, unequivocally, not publicly say this if it wasn’t 1000% true. You don’t “save face” lying about something that could be uncovered one way or another.

They also don't say it wasn't working because of the insane legal ramifications to admitting they lied to millions of users. Blind Freddy can see how bad that would be. Instead, they have a legally tight phrase to say it was working, where if probed they can weasel their way out of it.

 

[MUrhino]

Then WHY wasn’t it released? Oh, because it didn’t actually work? Got it. Piss off. No saving face here. Much better to admit you got ahead of yourselves and offer an apology…to keep denying what we all know is disheartening.

Business 101 isn’t that hard… this is just embarrassing at this point.

 

[gmarm]

I don’t know, it’s hard to trust a guy that wears shirts like that.

Hahahaha, so unwarranted

 

[gmarm]

Damn, that was a tough interviewer. Nice.

I'm at least glad that Apple is aware of the problems and actively working to address them.

 

[AndiG]

Ah, stop talking - release it or shut up.

 

[mpuk]

Not mentioned here or anywhere else is the best way to prove something works is to have a live keynote to show things off.

…and then simply ship a working product like you said you would.

 

[platinumaqua]

How real and working was it? From the scale of AirPower - iOS 6.0 Maps - iOS 5 Siri?

 

[Sophytaylor6@]

Only users can analyze the Siri features and give their views without any partiality. Rest, Apple should not claim anything before the product's launch.

 

[Schizoid]

Getting Siri to work at all would be a start…

 

[mxrider88]

Tim told me that the unicorn emoji was inspired by a real one but they can’t show it to us

 

[cjsuk]

It probably was real but doesn’t work well enough to be useful every time. As indicated but hallucinatory garbage in message summaries.

 

[wanha]

I don’t know, it’s hard to trust a guy that wears shirts like that.

okay... what are you wearing?

 

[wanha]

Not mentioned here or anywhere else is the best way to prove something works is to have a live keynote to show things off.

true, but that's not actually the point of keynotes, is it?

 

[gh0stpr0t0c0lburner]

No need to check anything. The person I quoted is using the word as an *idiom*.

I know that. Even as an idiom, it’s not happening.

 

[JoeDownUnder]

Apple marketed the iPhone 16 with false advertising knowing very well, and by their own admission, they didn't have a shippable version of Siri. 🤔

 

[SilmarilFinder]

And in other news, the Nigerian Prince has assured us his fortune is just waiting to be released, any day now.

 

[RedGT]

Greg’s timbre goes a bit off key when asked about Siri.

I’m not convinced.

 

[bluecoast]

"There's this narrative out there that it was demoware only," added Joswiak. "No."​

I wonder how burned the bridge with Gruber is. Like, will there be water under it by next year?

It’s hard to see how they could’ve sat down with him after his infamous article. They would’ve been on the defensive and apple doesn’t do defensive.

I think Gruber the right call - it was vapour ware / demo ware and apple lost credibility.

Maybe it was working in the lab.

But that’s not the same as having a product that works well for a few hundred million users (I’m not sure what the install base of apple intelligence phones is).

I would imagine that they’ve had a few off the record conversations with him and that the door is currently ajar - not exactly open but not shut.

 

[bluecoast]

People often love to jump to the most nefarious conclusions believing Apple and other companies are being evil when there are delays. Rather than understanding that tech product development is often met with problems that are difficult to solve in a timely manner, and thus encounter delays.

It happens from time to time with all tech companies. 100% perfection 100% of the time doesn't exist when humans are involved. It seems only people who are actually engaged in product development (systems engineers, hardware/software engineers, product managers, etc.) understand that.

I think most people get that.

The problem was that apple made a big deal of it at WWDC 24 then again at the iPhone 16 launch, saying that these phones were made especially for apple intelligence.

Then running the ad campaign with the last of us actress.

Then pulling it.

It would’ve been far better if apple underpromised and over delivered.