All the YouTube reviews etc that I've seen trying out the new Siri beta (mostly on iOS as opposed to MacOS) have focussed on Siri's on-device awareness e.g. searching through emails, messages, photos etc to answer questions but I'm curious about how it performs as a more general purpose assistant. There's also a lot of stuff about getting it to generate images etc.
I've been using the free AI capabilities built into basic free Google search results page (in Safari on my Mac) to help with quite a few things that I've been researching, e.g. discussing the best places to get travel insurance for a 120 day trip, what sort of restrictions and sub-limits there are, who are the most competitive insurers, what happens if I miss a flight due to traffic delays vs the plane going technical etc. Another example is UK electricity tariffs, how much money I might save with an in-home battery to shift energy from off peak to peak times, how that varies with battery size, adding solar, the orientation of the solar panels in my specific location etc. Basically all sorts of stuff and I've been really impressed with how good (and fast to respond) the free Google AI is for that sort of stuff.
I do realise that AI can get things wrong so I use it as a testing ground and always follow source links and double-check before taking any actions but I still find it quite useful to set directions, get a shortlist of providers to look at and a basic idea of what's out there etc.
I'm wondering whether anyone here who is trying out the beta version of new Siri has used it for any of those sort of fairly protracted discussions about some general topic area not related to any personal on-device data (mail, messages etc) and if so how does it perform vs e.g. having a similar conversation with the AI built into the Google search results page.
I've been using the free AI capabilities built into basic free Google search results page (in Safari on my Mac) to help with quite a few things that I've been researching, e.g. discussing the best places to get travel insurance for a 120 day trip, what sort of restrictions and sub-limits there are, who are the most competitive insurers, what happens if I miss a flight due to traffic delays vs the plane going technical etc. Another example is UK electricity tariffs, how much money I might save with an in-home battery to shift energy from off peak to peak times, how that varies with battery size, adding solar, the orientation of the solar panels in my specific location etc. Basically all sorts of stuff and I've been really impressed with how good (and fast to respond) the free Google AI is for that sort of stuff.
I do realise that AI can get things wrong so I use it as a testing ground and always follow source links and double-check before taking any actions but I still find it quite useful to set directions, get a shortlist of providers to look at and a basic idea of what's out there etc.
I'm wondering whether anyone here who is trying out the beta version of new Siri has used it for any of those sort of fairly protracted discussions about some general topic area not related to any personal on-device data (mail, messages etc) and if so how does it perform vs e.g. having a similar conversation with the AI built into the Google search results page.