Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
iOS 18 Rumored to Feature Major Siri Improvements
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
well, they claim that the more that you use it the better it gets because it learns. I don’t know if I believe that, because voice dictation seems to have gotten worse in the last couple of weeks. I still have iOS 16, so I will see if it is any better in iOS 17.
I don’t understand why they can’t do some updates now and not wait to do major updates all at one time.
It was slow and constant process. Competition worked for improving while Apple did absolutely nothing
I use a shortcut to workaround this on a newer car. But on a older car this doesn't work. I'm guessing that the BT connection between phone and car takes longer on an older car. The shortcut is running before the connection is complete.
I have never liked shortcuts and will always avoid using it, I just have an adverse reaction to using it, makes me want to throw my phone. It's never synced to HomePod correctly. And it conflicts with the scenes in the Home app. Turning off the lights in my home by saying "Hey Siri, turn off the lights" has become very painful and hardly ever works. It usually results in Siri replying, Sorry you phone is not on the same wifi network as you home pod. Or Sorry the is no shortcut named lights off. Its completely ruined my connected home experience. I have so much trouble simply trying to turn off my lights I am bitterly dissapointed with the whole Shortcuts > Home app > HomePod experience.
It’s not clear that Apple has put much resources into Siri before now. They do improve the voice to text sometimes and they did move a lot of the process to be local on device, but that’s about it. From the hints we have gotten, the way Siri is built, any changes are a major PITA.
Siri has needed a new approach for some time, but the other voice assistants are only minimally better and Apple just hasn’t felt the pressure to do the work to make Siri really useful. I’m encouraged by the rumors around this. As long as people aren’t looking for Siri to turn into a magical answer machine like ChatGPT. I expect a smarter assistant who can better interpret requests in context and handle more complex actions.
I confess, I’m completely confused by that first one.
I asked “hey, Siri, how many miles between LA and San Fransisco?”
The answer was “San Francisco, CA is about 381 miles from Los Angeles, CA by car.”
One problem with Siri is that the responses are not consistant, possibly due to software APIs timing our or something.
While Siri is only barely AI (a lot of it is hard coded), we probably need to get used to the fact that actual AIs will not always respond the same way to the same input.
Why is Apple waiting until iOS 18? Siri has a birthday coming on October 4 . last year, siri’s 10th birthday, would have been the perfect time to give her a whole bunch of new functionality, but since Apple did not do that, and were very quiet on her birthday even about her existence, October 4 is coming again this year. Now is the time Apple. Why are we waiting till iOS 18 to give Siri a whole bunch of new functionality?
Probably because they have to develop the software for it.
Current Siri is built with an AI interface into a very inflexible core that is mostly hand coded. They have tried modifying that over the years but it’s just not enough. We have all seen the lack of significant progress. To really make a difference, they need to replace large parts of Siri. That takes time. We’ll see iOS 18 in June. That is less than a year away.
They can’t just download and clone ChatGPT. That kind of web search answerbot isn’t what we need from Siri. There are other tools for that. We need something that can do things for us based on our devices and our data. Siri needs to be able to properly understand more complex requests and the context of those requests. Then Siri needs to execute one or more tasks as a result. Hopefully it is more flexible and failure resistant than the current Siri who too often just throws up their hands and says “something went wrong”.
Doing that and not having it declare its love for you, takes time.
Siri is garbage. Apple just needs to let her go in favor of third party personal assistants, like Alexa. I'm so tired of asking Siri a simple question and her telling me "here a list of website." Or "you'll need to unlock your iPhone first." Nothing but a useless gimmmick with no helpful information.
But my point is, there are already things that Siri can do that they have taken away. They need to reinstate those and it wouldn’t seem as if they were doing nothing until iOS 18. Siri used to be able to start a screen recording in one of the betas. They took that away. Siri used to be able to search your photos according to time, object, location-like spotlight can. They took that function away. Siri used to be able to add to your notes. They took that function away. There are probably more things that were already Siri functions that have been removed. Simply putting those back would make it look like had gotten better. There’s simply no reason to wait another half year to look more awesome when other digital assistants and chatbots have become so impressive. I don’t want to see it look like chat, GPT, but they should give us some thing.