Based on the bad Siri experiences i had, when i try to draw a picture of her in my mind, it becomes more like this.
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Apple Spending Millions of Dollars a Day on Conversational AI
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As far as I can see from the writeup Siri and this Ajax are two different teams working in parallel and independently, the latter being more of a research project. LLMs have big problems with knowing what's the truth so it'll probably stay research only for a while.
Furthermore your issue might be the voice recognition module not the actual "assistant", so a third team.
Imagine Steve pop out of thin air and yell at you in frustration: "You siri it wrong!"
I still just want Siri to be an actual personal assistant.
e.g., I change my status to focusing or something and then
When I exit focus mode, Siri then gives me a summary of actions taken, asks me if I want to confirm appointments it scheduled, and lets me know which VIPs need a follow up outside of just calendar responses.
I'd also like Siri to be able to periodically check my junk mail folder and alert me to anything that was borderline on spam confidence so I can check for myself.
Telling Siri to do stuff via voice is not really helpful on the Mac for example. Being an actual PA however - yes.
Voice control is great for HomePods and the watch, but for the phone, iPad and Mac, imho its mostly irrelevant, the back end "intelligence" to interpret intent and actually HELP me get things done is far more important and game-changing if they can make it work.
e.g., I change my status to focusing or something and then
- notifications from emails/calendar/etc. stop
- Siri can intelligently alert me to mail/calls/etc. from VIPs I nominate or people who have urgent sounding requests via intelligent interpretation of email content and whether or not they sent a follow up
- calendar requests can be tentatively responded to by Siri on my behalf
When I exit focus mode, Siri then gives me a summary of actions taken, asks me if I want to confirm appointments it scheduled, and lets me know which VIPs need a follow up outside of just calendar responses.
I'd also like Siri to be able to periodically check my junk mail folder and alert me to anything that was borderline on spam confidence so I can check for myself.
Telling Siri to do stuff via voice is not really helpful on the Mac for example. Being an actual PA however - yes.
Voice control is great for HomePods and the watch, but for the phone, iPad and Mac, imho its mostly irrelevant, the back end "intelligence" to interpret intent and actually HELP me get things done is far more important and game-changing if they can make it work.
There's only so much you can spend on this stuff even if you have more money; the number at the cutting edge who know how to improve things is only so many people.
That's not an unfair point. But they have had over a DECADE. And they have used anticompetitive tactics to keep talent in the past (https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu...aching-case-growing-debate-employee-mobility/). And others are way ahead of them. So, it seems as if they are doing something wrong.
Siri requires a complete overhaul. Hopefully Siri can improve quickly
may be i am wrong. controlling your devices or your home with an assistant like siri is a total different thing than asking gpt for something you want to know. for me AI chats like GPT make google search obsolete, not your „home assistant“.
Siri enhancements are needed of course
Siri enhancements are needed of course
I'll go farther than this - in the markets I've been in (the various maps apps vary in quality quite a bit by location), Apple Maps blows the Google Maps app out of the water.
I think the general feedback on the music service is that it doesn't do nearly enough for personalized discovery.
Thanks for that insight. I have nothing to compare the Apple Music service as I am not using anything else for music streaming. But this makes sense.
voice recognition is optionally available on-device, as are (simpler) responses.
Siri's voice capabilities are an amalgamation of a dictation and a (tiered, typed) command-and-control system; it basically scans things like your contacts and installed apps to build a locally personalized system. When you say "Call Alice", it is specifically looking for names in your contacts which are phonetically close to what you said. If you have an Alicia, it may still pick that as a (lower quality) match, but rather than placing the call automatically it would ask you to confirm.
If you say "Play Metallica", it may know the band name because it is an artist on some locally downloaded playlist. Or, it may say "playing music is something Apple Music does, let's go off to the cloud and ask them for something which sounds like what they said".
If you say "pop on some Barry Manilow", it may not have the context to know any of those words, to know you are talking about an artist. It'll do its best job, but there's very little context to disambiguate. So you'll likely get something like "here's what I found on the internet for barely manila".
I know! I must have totally missed the feature where I could go to chat.openai.com and say "set a five minute timer" into my microphone.
Don’t give them any ideas 😩
I could see Apple making tiers of Siri.
Apple: “In order to use Siri for advance features such as setting a timer and defining words, you must have an iPhone pro. Siri on the base model iPhone can only be used to make calls and send text messages.” “Siri ultra requires a monthly subscription starting at 9.99/month” 😂
Because Apple, and its' users, are their own worst enemy. They want an equivalent to Google Maps but don't want to share data at all. Well guess what... enjoy Yelp and going to a store in Europe when you want to find a Pizza place in your US city. The same goes for Siri, which is more than likely more than a decade behind Google, Amazon, probably even Samsung's Bixby. It is never updated via the App store only major updates. Then they act like they have hit a major milestone when Siri can identify users Dogs, and Cats in photos.... without Data nothing is going to improve.
Sometimes this strategy has worked out well for Apple. Notably the iPod, and iPhone where they added and improved upon the original MP3 player and smartphone.
But lately, it feels like Apple has been simply chasing and just catching up to what's already been done. I'm thinking AppleTV, VisionPro, Maps, and of course Siri.
When ChatGPT, Bard and others are already in the mainstream, I do wonder what's Apple's AI assistant will bring to the table. Hopefully something amazing, but maybe nothing special. And just being on the millions of iPhones and iOS devices might be good enough for Apple.
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I mostly use Siri for home automation, and have a different take.
I have Google Assistant on Nest Hubs—I gave up on Alexa as the spam ("by the way, did you know that…") was super annoying) as well and I don't think Siri is really that much behind.
First off, Shortcuts is WAY more powerful than Alexa or Google's automation platforms, once you learn how to use it. There are far more triggers available, for instance, and you can do more complex if/then and even webhook/API requests which unlocks some really powerful stuff. The app Controller for HomeKit even lets you create automations with more complex trigger conditions, and Pushcut lets you run an automation server for requests that are app-based. Google's Home app is frankly abysmal, Amazon's is cluttered and hard to use.
Google Assistant often thinks I'm talking to it when I'm not, butting into conversations out of nowhere, and often just says "here's what I found on the web" and shows Google results—on a verryyyy slow and glitchy browser. But that's just for random trivia stuff, which I rarely use any of them for—that was fun for like a day when I first got them, but I'm happy to just search the web when I'm interested in a topic.
For home automation, Google and Alexa both say they have "works with Google" integrations, but often times they're quite useless or buggy compared to HomeKit. For instance, my security system "works with Google" but just shows a "no response" on the display; some lights also do the same; sometimes it tries to connect the integration, then it just quits the flow with no further information.
On the other hand, fewer things support HomeKit natively (Matter will help with this), but Homebridge running on a Raspberry Pi has been transformative in terms of bringing everything into HomeKit. (Another good one is the Starling Hub which brings all Nest cameras/devices into HomeKit). The Apple Home app is also the best of the 3 in terms of usability. (Home Assistant is great too, but way more complicated to set up).
They all work fine for me for basic things like setting timers and turning on lights, Siri rarely misunderstands me, and the voice recognition has improved over time from my perspective. It is annoying when you get the "I'm having trouble…" on the HomePods and hope that improves, but it is often down to a networking issue I've found. Upgrading and configuring my router properly has helped a lot.
Also, the Siri voices are the best-sounding of the lot. Alexa's voice is grating to my ears, Google's are OK, but Siri has the most natural and pleasant-sounding of the lot, IMO.
I must be weird cause I rarely use Siri on my phone except while driving to respond to texts; I'm more likely to use it on my watch, but just for little things like "add this to my shopping list" or "set a timer for x minutes" and the raise-and-speak feature is super nifty and usually gets things right.
TL;DR: I'm sincerely curious what y'all wish Siri could do that it doesn't, or where it falls behind GA or Alexa, which are both now being let to rot by their owners since they're just financial drags on them. Siri has plenty of room for improvement, but it does the job for what I need (home automation, timers, alarms, replying to texts).
I have Google Assistant on Nest Hubs—I gave up on Alexa as the spam ("by the way, did you know that…") was super annoying) as well and I don't think Siri is really that much behind.
First off, Shortcuts is WAY more powerful than Alexa or Google's automation platforms, once you learn how to use it. There are far more triggers available, for instance, and you can do more complex if/then and even webhook/API requests which unlocks some really powerful stuff. The app Controller for HomeKit even lets you create automations with more complex trigger conditions, and Pushcut lets you run an automation server for requests that are app-based. Google's Home app is frankly abysmal, Amazon's is cluttered and hard to use.
Google Assistant often thinks I'm talking to it when I'm not, butting into conversations out of nowhere, and often just says "here's what I found on the web" and shows Google results—on a verryyyy slow and glitchy browser. But that's just for random trivia stuff, which I rarely use any of them for—that was fun for like a day when I first got them, but I'm happy to just search the web when I'm interested in a topic.
For home automation, Google and Alexa both say they have "works with Google" integrations, but often times they're quite useless or buggy compared to HomeKit. For instance, my security system "works with Google" but just shows a "no response" on the display; some lights also do the same; sometimes it tries to connect the integration, then it just quits the flow with no further information.
On the other hand, fewer things support HomeKit natively (Matter will help with this), but Homebridge running on a Raspberry Pi has been transformative in terms of bringing everything into HomeKit. (Another good one is the Starling Hub which brings all Nest cameras/devices into HomeKit). The Apple Home app is also the best of the 3 in terms of usability. (Home Assistant is great too, but way more complicated to set up).
They all work fine for me for basic things like setting timers and turning on lights, Siri rarely misunderstands me, and the voice recognition has improved over time from my perspective. It is annoying when you get the "I'm having trouble…" on the HomePods and hope that improves, but it is often down to a networking issue I've found. Upgrading and configuring my router properly has helped a lot.
Also, the Siri voices are the best-sounding of the lot. Alexa's voice is grating to my ears, Google's are OK, but Siri has the most natural and pleasant-sounding of the lot, IMO.
I must be weird cause I rarely use Siri on my phone except while driving to respond to texts; I'm more likely to use it on my watch, but just for little things like "add this to my shopping list" or "set a timer for x minutes" and the raise-and-speak feature is super nifty and usually gets things right.
TL;DR: I'm sincerely curious what y'all wish Siri could do that it doesn't, or where it falls behind GA or Alexa, which are both now being let to rot by their owners since they're just financial drags on them. Siri has plenty of room for improvement, but it does the job for what I need (home automation, timers, alarms, replying to texts).