New Version of Siri to 'Lean' on Google Gemini

[michaeljk]

I've been trying Gemini pro and it still makes things up constantly. For example, I was having it read a death certificate from the 1940s and it made up a story about the death happening from a lawn mower, when it was an aneurysm. That was not in the source document (or anywhere) and it wanted to create a narrative, and for what? To entertain me? It was complete nonsense. I fear for the people trusting AI for their work.

I don't really use Gemini (on occasion, when using Chrome for something, Gemini auto-inserts a summary). I use Perplexity mostly and once in a while ChatGPT. I actually pay a subscription to Perplexity so I get additional citations for the answers it gives, which is great for verifying the accuracy of responses, but I also use it in research I might be doing for a client on a specific topic (behavioral health issues). This way, I can get to original source material, and then decide whether to send that to a client for their own review. It is VERY rare that I get an outright hallucination on Perplexity.

 

[GioGiusi]

Siri already has a "boost' from Chat GPT. It's just that using it is garbage. I want Siri to be able to talk to ChatGPT or some powerful model and get answers and just relay them without clunk.
I also want it to be able to perform virtually any task that a user could do manually.

That's all it has to do to go from useless to useful.

 

[GioGiusi]

I sound like a scratched record but Siri ,as it is now, does everything I need. Handles my smart home, does dictation of new messages and reads my messages while driving. With very high accuracy. If needed I can say hey siri ask ChatGPT for general questions.

What I think some people are talking about is deep integration into apps (app intents) that require third party support and which takes time.
Everyone likes to complain, but what actually do you want a voice assistant to do?

It does do all of those things, but with a very very high failure rate for MOST users.

 

[michaeljk]

“Let’s build Apple Silicon so we don’t have to pay Intel”
“Let’s build the C1 chip so we don’t have to pay Qualcomm”
“Let’s write Apple Maps so we don’t have to pay Google”
“Let’s pay Google to fix Siri”

This may actually be the model Apple is using now, which goes all the way back to the Apple I.

"Let's use Intel's CPUs until our own chips are good enough (or better for our use)."
"Let's use Qualcomm's communications chips until our own are good enough (or better for our use)."
"Let's use Google Maps until Apple Maps is good enough (not ever better, yet)."
"Let's use Gemini and ChatGPT until our LLM is good enough (or better for our use)."

 

[Jack Burton]

I went back to google assistant because I was tired of Google Gemini being slow and ineffective at basic stuff.

But now I'm getting warnings in google assistant when I ask things like "read the latest text from mom"
....
....
....
"Sorry, reading texts from specific contacts is no longer available."


They are sunsetting google assistant. A shame, because basic things like timers, math questions, are answered immediately.

 

[Shirasaki]

What would Jobs have done better over the past 15 years?? Lets see... No idiotic notch BS. no keyboard issues and recalls. no removing useful ports then reapplying them. No falling far behind in the AI race as they are with the Siri garbage. No chasing every gimmicky thing the competition is doing. Most importantly, by now, he most likely would have invented additional products that the world didn't know they needed, but yet, ended up transforming the world.

Apple is a mess right now precisely because they don't have strong leadership, especially visionary leadership. Imo, Apple's success over the past 15 years is still all because of the foundation and legacy that Jobs created.

I’m frequently amazed to see people making Steve Jobs like his is an eternal god and can do no wrong at leading Apple to its next glory. Sure, all the above would be speculation but had Steve Jobs still alive today, he probably would face the same problem that competitors are copying Apple but better, just without iOS. Tim Cook for all his flaws on product management and innovation, excels at leading Apple into one of the wealthiest companies in the world, and that counts for something. Is Apple becoming complacent because of that? Maybe. But to imagine Steve Jobs magically could change the world again and again is a bit stretch at this point.

 

[whatnot]

Maybe those folks want voice assistant to be themselves, a carbon copy of that, able to act with conscious and on their behalf, much like some version of this depicted in sci-fi movies.

I don't know if that silly Apple 'Morning Show' show counts for sci-fi, but they let some meta (oh no) product placement slip a few weeks back, where in a shocking plot twist, $250m AI assistant beta went rogue during a keynote presentation.

brace! brace! brace!

 

[bmark]

Bloomberg says Apple is not expected to promote this partnership. Gemini models will just power parts of Siri secretly behind the scenes. All of the new Siri will be marketed as Apple’s technology running on Apple servers, presented using an Apple user interface. The deal will simply help Apple fill in some crucial technology gaps where its own LLM systems are currently not good enough.

So Apple is basically admitting they suck at AI and then trying to hide the partnership with Google acting like it's Apple technology. Pure deception!

 

[emvath]

Siri is so absolutely useless, that I'd be up for anything that actually works.

 

[Fraserpatty]

This article is sort of a admission they are too late and are buying services from
Google and rebranding it.

I’ve missed the part where it said they were rebranding it. I hope they don’t, I’m rather fond of the Siri name.

 

[SactoGuy18]

Gemini is actually not bad now that they have done a lot of streaming to fix the problems discovered early on.

 

[whatnot]

from the article in New Yorker about the power-sucking data centres servicing this new Tulip Mania:

Users ask questions, prompting the A.I. to produce individual units of intelligence called “tokens.” A token might be a small square of pixels or a fragment of a word. To write a college term paper, an A.I. might produce about five thousand tokens, consuming enough electricity to run a microwave oven at full power for about three minutes.​

multiply 'draw me a nazi sandwich doing splits on stilts' by 'more than eight hundred million people who use ChatGPT [alone] every week', and set your alarm to End Of Days.

 

[hagjohn]

AI and for that matter Siri has been a huge failure for Apple. Apple does most everything really good but they have failed bigly on these. It is a shame.

 

[NervousFish2]

The iPhone 15 Pro was not marketed that way initially. It was only included as Apple-Intelligence-capable in the iPhone 16 marketing. There already is a class action suit against Apple on this. There's no need to pile on way after the fact.

But they did market it that way. And that marketing was incorrect.

 

[NervousFish2]

That lawsuit already happened half a year ago: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/03/20/apple-intelligence-siri-lawsuit/

Looks like it's still ongoing

 

[SBlue1]

Oh…no….



DARTH VADER: NNNNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Apple, please….STOP DEALING WITH GOOGLE!!!! FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Smh surprised Cook ain’t just tellin giigle to skim some off the top of their safari search deal : (

Why? Google is just superior to any other search engine. Same with AI. I use ChatGPT for 95% of use cases, but when I want to know something I heard in the news or something up to date I use Gemini.

 

[bushman4]

Google has a decent grip on AI as we’ve seen with Gemini so Google enhancing Siri could be a big plus or not what people want
Time will tell

 

[Genelec8341]

Oh great, a Siri integrated reality distortion field.

 

[theinstructor]

This is absolutely laughable. Apple I know you read these comments. You are becoming a complete joke. Stop it. Just stop it. Get serious again, stop worrying about how many fringe groups you can please and go for the real win here. You have the resources but your attention is on hairstyles and lifestyles rather than core functionality. This is really stupid.

 

[neuropsychguy]

What would Jobs have done better over the past 15 years?? Lets see... No idiotic notch BS. no keyboard issues and recalls. no removing useful ports then reapplying them. No falling far behind in the AI race as they are with the Siri garbage. No chasing every gimmicky thing the competition is doing. Most importantly, by now, he most likely would have invented additional products that the world didn't know they needed, but yet, ended up transforming the world.

Apple is a mess right now precisely because they don't have strong leadership, especially visionary leadership. Imo, Apple's success over the past 15 years is still all because of the foundation and legacy that Jobs created.

Those are all your opinion. In other words, you're just guessing. You don't know what Steve Jobs would have done. Invoking the spirit of Steve Jobs is completely fruitless (pun intended).

 

[smulji]

I’m frequently amazed to see people making Steve Jobs like his is an eternal god and can do no wrong at leading Apple to its next glory. Sure, all the above would be speculation but had Steve Jobs still alive today, he probably would face the same problem that competitors are copying Apple but better, just without iOS. Tim Cook for all his flaws on product management and innovation, excels at leading Apple into one of the wealthiest companies in the world, and that counts for something. Is Apple becoming complacent because of that? Maybe. But to imagine Steve Jobs magically could change the world again and again is a bit stretch at this point.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1985176339712970900

 

[hans1972]

Another circular relationship in AI. There is a lot of that going on. Company A pays Company B to buy Company A's product.

So Google pays Apple to make Google search the default, Apple pays Google to run the AI engine powering Siri, Apple correctly claims "We are not reading your data" while Google hoovers up everything to feed the maw of its AI system and the advertising model as well. Both companies write off their payments to each other as business expenses.

They can't do it otherwise in accounting.

Google pays Apple for default search engine: Revenue for Apple and cost for Google
Apple pays Google for LLM: Cost for Apple and revenue for Google

It's not circular since they're independent services which will exist independently of each other.

 

[dabirdwell]

Built on PPC systems would have been interesting as well.

Oh jeez. Don't date us that get this...

 

[jole]

I think this is a fine compromise: Running multimodal LLM smart enough to be useful in locked down Apple cloud. Getting one of the three leaders train the model to ensure decent quality and actually shipping it. This gives Apple air cover to continue training own models until they are on par with quality.

Still WAY better than just streaming all the private context data to OpenAI/Anthropic/Google. This is a ticking time bomb for everyone sharing their secrets with AI today.

Disappointing part: Why this has taken ages? This strategy was obvious and could have been brought to production year ago. Why Apple failed to build in-house model training capabilities so badly that they have to outsource model training to Google?

What would have been exiting would have been a ~2B parameter on device multimodal model targeting 6GB RAM — only delegating to cloud as needed. Even if that would have been limited to 12GB RAM devices, it would have been something no-one else has. Endless stream of ads showing off how Siri can help you even when you're offline.

Theory: Latter was the target, and they failed to get model smart enough to be useful. Gave up and outsourced model training to Google while building data centers to run the models with Apple's locked down HW.

 

[Mrkevinfinnerty]

iOS28 to 'lean' on Android