Apple's Big AI Push Implied By Startup Acquisitions and Job Postings

[ry-guy]

Crazy, they’ve been hiring for Siri and buying companies like it for years. And nothing has come about from it. I think they really missed the ball with this one. Most likely won’t catch up unless they have something truly groundbreaking.

 

[wanha]

What does Alexa's profitability have to do with Siri's usefulness?

Answering questions with questions I see 🙂

I point it out because Amazon execs have reportedly been extremely disappointed with the results of it and I don't know how a better Siri would have really changed much of anything for Apple, so I am confused what the big missed opportunity is.

So please enlighten me, what's the huge missed opportunity with Siri?

 

[brijazz]

Answering questions with questions I see 🙂

I point it out because Amazon execs have reportedly been extremely disappointed with the results of it and I don't know how a better Siri would have really changed much of anything for Apple, so I am confused what the big missed opportunity is.

So please enlighten me, what's the huge missed opportunity with Siri?

Having it work more reliably and with increased functionality, for a start. It kind of feels like Apple hasn't made any meaningful improvements to Siri since it launched - it's just kind of languished when compared to other areas of the iPhone experience (faster chips, better battery, better camera, more customization options, etc.).

It just seems that Siri is way behind all of the other stuff that Apple has been doing, and they could build something that's head-and-shoulders above the competition. That's the missed opportunity - I'm thinking of Siri from a utility standpoint, not in terms of how much money it generates for Apple.

BTW, I'm not answering a question with a question. I am replying to the sentence you wrote AFTER the question.

 

[Lounge vibes 05]

Apple; If you can't innovate, buy and copy.

Where do you think multitouch came from?
Or the original iTunes?
Or the original iPod software?

None of that was originally apples, they just bought it all.
Edit: the original Siri was also bought, as was Apple (Beats) Music.
Mac OS X? More like Mac OS NEXT.

And the list goes on and on.

 

[Razorpit]

Siri understands what I'm saying (I have "Always Show Speech" enabled, so I can see what it thinks I said), but it's what it does with the info that's a problem. In the last few days:

1) I said "remind me that Ronnie will be away when I get to work". It added a reminder that simply said "Ronnie" and didn't set my workplace as a location.

2) I asked Siri to play a song by a band that I frequently listen to. It gave me a cover version of said song by some obscure band. Why isn't the OS smart enough to see that I listen to the band regularly and give me the version of the song that I most likely want to hear.

3) I asked for directions to a business that I was near (a road was closed and I had to re-route - not that familiar with the area so I asked for help), and instead Siri gave me directions to a town that shared the same name as the business. The business shows up in Maps, so why is that not the first choice instead of a town that's seven hours away?

4) On Apple TV, I asked it to "find the movie Maestro on Netflix" and it took me to the preplay screen for the movie "My Octopus Teacher". Not even close!

It's pretty good at setting a timer though.

I like how when I tell Siri to, “play my music” I‘ll inevitably get ~ 3 out of 10 Christmas songs, in the middle of April. Care to guess what I don’t get in November and December? 😂

Not only is Siri bad with the things you mentioned, the overall ability of just playing an album sucks. I’m from the days where it was ok to put in a cassette and deliver your papers. I know many albums from front to back. For some reason either AppleMusic or Siri continues to replace original tracks with alternate versions, or live tracks. How hard is it to play a complete, original album?

Having it work more reliably and with increased functionality, for a start. It kind of feels like Apple hasn't made any meaningful improvements to Siri since it launched - it's just kind of languished when compared to other areas of the iPhone experience (faster chips, better battery, better camera, more customization options, etc.).

It just seems that Siri is way behind all of the other stuff that Apple has been doing, and they could build something that's head-and-shoulders above the competition. That's the missed opportunity - I'm thinking of Siri from a utility standpoint, not in terms of how much money it generates for Apple.

BTW, I'm not answering a question with a question. I am replying to the sentence you wrote AFTER the question.

I’d argue with all the advancements in technology, Siri has gotten worse since pre iPhone 4S days. Siri was amazing technology when it was introduce, it has languished under Apple’s ownership.

 

[Lounge vibes 05]

In fairness to Siri I have the same issues with both Google Assistant and Alexa. I am not sure what Google has done but Assistant has really gone down in the past few years.

With Siri I’ve always got pretty much a 70/30% accuracy rate. 70% of the time it does what I need to do, the other 30% it fails.

Alexa is a lot closer to 50/50, and the half the time that it does work, it’s accompanied usually by an advertisement for some sort of Amazon service.

Google has always been fine… At googling things. Not much else for me, but for quick Internet queries it’s definitely ahead of the other two.

 

[maxfromdenmark]

I wish I could ask Siri for moving music from HomePods in living room to kitchen or something other useful stuff like that

 

[crsh1976]

I doubt that Apple will be able to make a satisfying New Siri in a few months.

God bless iPhone 16 series

Which begs the question, is this in the news only to hype the next iPhone model's sales?

 

[Fraserpatty]

Let's just hope Siri AI will be available with most of its features on previous iPhones, and not only iPhones 16 +

I know technology progresses, and sometimes cannot be backwards compatible. But Apple users have waited for an improvement to Siri for many years, and I think it would be in bad faith to limit it to the newest device.

 

[dmn11]

I hope that Apple is not putting all its money in trying to make Siri work... but putting some of it in nice photo editing gimmicks... like the ones found on Android devices... deleting background people, intelligent cropping, etc...

 

[Fraserpatty]

I hope that Apple is not putting all its money in trying to make Siri work... but putting some of it in nice photo editing gimmicks... like the ones found on Android devices... deleting background people, intelligent cropping, etc...

I get that, but Siri is the one device that is front and center on all devices. Even the HomePod and Apple TV. They really need to put all their effort in making it better and they should’ve done that long ago.

That’s not to say that I don’t agree with you about photo editing gimmicks; even though they can be purchased in some apps, I’d rather they be Apple native tools myself. I have many thousands of pictures because I am the custodian of the family genealogy. I want all the family pictures to be the best they can be.

 

[jimbobb24]

3) I asked for directions to a business that I was near (a road was closed and I had to re-route - not that familiar with the area so I asked for help), and instead Siri gave me directions to a town that shared the same name as the business. The business shows up in Maps, so why is that not the first choice instead of a town that's seven hours away?

Why does maps search for things with the same name in other countries or states instead of the place 15 minutes away? These are the mysteries of the universe.

 

[citysnaps]

I’d argue with all the advancements in technology, Siri has gotten worse since pre iPhone 4S days. Siri was amazing technology when it was introduce, it has languished under Apple’s ownership.

And I'd argue that Siri has become remarkably better every year since then. It's very rare when it doesn't perform as desired.

 

[MisterSavage]

Any chance to improve Siri from "dumber than a box of hammers" is fine with me!

My current "favorite" interaction:

I have a person I interact with *every single day* via iMessage.

If I say, "Siri send a text to ____" then Siri will say "Which one?" (meaning use with apple id or phone number)

 

[WestonHarvey1]

They seem to be trying to hire a ton of contractors for this. I'm a nobody and I got cold called about it - a "black" group focused on "autonomous systems and technology".

 

[Fraserpatty]

it looks like chat, GPT et al l have forced their hand. I’m glad.

 

[IllegitimateValor]

Regarding the LLM iteration of AI, Apple will show up late to the party, best-dressed, pre-gamed, case of the best vintage in hand, with lipstick stains on the collar and sugar on their nose like they’re not just waking up to the scene. AS PER USUAL. 😘

 

[deepspacecowboy]

Compared to what, exactly? Alexa?

Alexa has cost Amazon billions with precious little monetary return to show for it and precious few ideas for doing so in the future

Monetary return on Alexa is hard to gauge. How many people tell Alexa to order XYZ every day? Each of those sales is monetary return. Plus Amazon uses all the data it collects to more effectively market to its customers. As far as the future goes, Amazon doesn't have a platform/OS like Microsoft, Google, and Apple. I don't think they view Alexa as a full-blown assistant/AI. It's mostly a shopping/marketing tool and I think it probably pays off for them quite nicely.

 

[peterlandwalker]

Let's just hope Siri AI will be available with most of its features on previous iPhones, and not only iPhones 16 +

That's probably their most valuable asset.
For sure they're going to make some features available only for newer devices, but this will probably be something only with some marginal advantage (generative imagery processing or something like that).

Other than that, most devices will get a better language understanding for Siri, better ability to identify specific OS and App requests in complex sentences from the user.
This seems reasonable and feasible, since better language understanding is probably the feature with most potential for 3rd-party devs, and will be available at a widespread scale on Apple's ecosystem.
They could do more, but to me that's their best advantage, on average: better NPU, CPU, GPU, faster RAM/Storage and a larger pool for devs.

 

[wanha]

Monetary return on Alexa is hard to gauge. How many people tell Alexa to order XYZ every day? Each of those sales is monetary return. Plus Amazon uses all the data it collects to more effectively market to its customers. As far as the future goes, Amazon doesn't have a platform/OS like Microsoft, Google, and Apple. I don't think they view Alexa as a full-blown assistant/AI. It's mostly a shopping/marketing tool and I think it probably pays off for them quite nicely.

That's a nice theory but this article suggests something completely different https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/202...failure-on-pace-to-lose-10-billion-this-year/

From said article:

"Just about every plan to monetize Alexa has failed, with one former employee calling Alexa "a colossal failure of imagination," and "a wasted opportunity." This month's layoffs are the end result of years of trying to turn things around."

 

[wanha]

Having it work more reliably and with increased functionality, for a start. It kind of feels like Apple hasn't made any meaningful improvements to Siri since it launched - it's just kind of languished when compared to other areas of the iPhone experience (faster chips, better battery, better camera, more customization options, etc.).

It just seems that Siri is way behind all of the other stuff that Apple has been doing, and they could build something that's head-and-shoulders above the competition. That's the missed opportunity - I'm thinking of Siri from a utility standpoint, not in terms of how much money it generates for Apple.

BTW, I'm not answering a question with a question. I am replying to the sentence you wrote AFTER the question.

Yes, Siri could be way better. I don't know if there are many people on earth that disagree with that.

But I still don't understand what that has to do with Siri being "one of the biggest missed opportunities in Apple's history".

Even if Siri was every bit as good - or even slightly better - as Alexa or Google Assistant, would it materially change anything?

I just don't see it.

 

[obviouslogic]

We’ll see what Apple comes up with. On device LLMs so far are underwhelming. ones like Llama/Alpaca/Vicuña aren’t bad but are limited by size of the models and speed.

Apple engineers have been doing some great work with AI imaging related tools (some of these are on GitHub) and making good progress with other ML tools.

As for Siri, I’m not sure what you are all doing with Siri but it works well for me. 🤷

Surprised this article has no mention of Apple’s Ferret open source project which is a multi-modal LLM.

 

[rchornef]

Is anyone else aggravated by the “uh-uh” response. It keeps interrupting me!

Absolutely. The problem with Siri has nothing to do with the lack of "artificial intelligence" so much as the lack of competence in product development.

 

[rchornef]

With Siri I’ve always got pretty much a 70/30% accuracy rate. 70% of the time it does what I need to do, the other 30% it fails.

Alexa is a lot closer to 50/50, and the half the time that it does work, it’s accompanied usually by an advertisement for some sort of Amazon service.

Google has always been fine… At googling things. Not much else for me, but for quick Internet queries it’s definitely ahead of the other two.

Turn on (or off) the lights in room a AND room b. Siri gets it right 10% of the time. From this user's perspective Siri and the surrounding functionality is an unbelievable failure. What makes it doubly awful is that it appears to be deployed with top notch hardware. But this hardware seems saddled with Siri related software that has zero quality control or even simple rational thought built in.

 

[d-klumpp]

Why couldn't Apple give users the option of using cloud vs on-device? For example, it could be a simple privacy setting which makes it clear that you can choose stronger data protections but at the expense of some performance. It's clear that there are some benefits to running these LLMs on the physical device, but the power of cloud computing cannot be denied.

I'm regularly in areas with such poor cell service that weather apps cannot update. On-device will be more useful then, particularly if tasks requiring external data can be stored for future execution. However, I agree that cloud resources could help, so some combo of on-device by default with supplemental cloud support might be ideal.