Apple's famously-squandered first-mover advantage with Siri is so entrenched at this point, it feels (at least to an outside observer) like it must simply be culturally and organizationally impossible for Apple to innovate in that space.
I’d love to be surprised at WWDC this year, but it intuitively seems exceedingly unlikely.
The original Siri was more capable than it is now, which blows my mind.
Apparently there's a senior exec in Apple that is even more of a puritan than the "AI safety" nuts and forced Siri to be dumbed down to prevent even the slightest risk of any impropriety.
With people like that in charge, innovation can't occur.
There was a period of time where siri bitflipped statements about %40 of the time for me. "Turn lights off" became on, "turn lights on" became off. And it understands my partner far less, despite both of us being native speakers.
What I have always found strange about Siri is how radically different the experience appears to be for each person. I know plenty of people where it works great but then you have tons that say it is shit. I have never seen a good explanation as it seems like Alexa and google assistant is fairly consistent person to person as compared to Siri.
It only ever understands me if I adopt an American accent; and that not consistently, presumably because it's bad (and often comically exaggerated). But my actual (British) voice never as far as I can recall.
So maybe the varied experience is largely just whether you're American and if so have the right regional accent? (For what it's worth, my go-to impression is I think what you'd call 'valley girl', or whatever the male equivalent is. Since I feel liiike that's basically what all city-dwelling Americans sound like to me anywaaay. Do they sound that way to you allso orrr no? ;) )
I think a lot of it has to do with constant changes that suddenly break phrases people are used to using.
For a personal example, I had a six-month period where Siri stopped understanding the word 'half' (as in, 'Hey Siri, volume to half'), and either ignored or misinterpreted any command that included it.
Do you use any Apple Home / HomeKit automations? She is very frustrating and verbose. And constantly starts playing U2 on my HomePods even though I swear that I have deleted that album four different ways.
I have used HomeKit for a VERY long time now and I can't remember the last time Siri had an issue controlling devices. It works 99% of the time and the 1% of the time it doesn't work is a rather specific part of the house where my watch has connectivity issues so Siri hangs.
I sooo wish i could delete that *** album because every time it gets me wrong it starts playing it. And I don't even like U2. If I didn't have that it would have nothing to play because my music library would be empty.
I'm amazed to see multiple posters in this thread still getting Bono-rolled by Apple products a decade later. I moved it to my “hidden purchases“ almost as many years ago and it has never resurfaced; has Apple changed something since then?
A year or so ago I was dealing with a mouse problem in my house. How this often manifested was a mouse running over one of my HomePods during the night, which would trigger Songs of Innocence to play and wake my partner and I up. I’ve never hated U2 so much in my life.
What? Siri catches what I say correctly probably less than 50% of the time. Nevermind its ability to actually do useful things. You ask it for trivia, it returns a “here’s what I found on the web” response. Google gives me the answer.
Google is superior, especially with knowledge questions but when it comes to things like sending text messages, controlling smart home devices, starting timers, setting reminders, Siri is almost flawless for me.
Some realize one should not give up essential private data for small, temporary conveniences. This point is lost on those whose livelihood depends on convincing the public otherwise.
Privacy is one of the reasons I use an Android phone. I don't want Apple to know my location every time I read the GPS. I don't want Apple to know every app I install on my device. I don't want to give Apple my billing details just to make my own apps.
Whether you want more privacy or more functionality, the solution is the same. Use the device that you can control.
Presumably you are using a de-googled Android phone then?
For most people, the choice is between giving that data to Apple or giving it to Google. Personally I am more worried about an advertising company leaking/misusing my data than a hardware company that has made privacy a differentiator in their branding. Not saying I trust that but you have to weigh up your risk factors
"Privacy" is not illegal in China. China has privacy regulations the US doesn't. Even if law enforcement can see absolutely everything (which they can't) the state still isn't interested in letting random other private parties see everything about you.
You’re moving the goalposts. Privacy from the data harvesting private sector, and privacy from the State, are different propositions. We see clearly talking about the former, and Apple has a….fairly good, but imperfect track record with the latter.
No. A Googled Android phone lets you choose which Google services you want to choose. It doesn't send any of the data to Google I mentioned earlier that an iPhone sends to Apple, so there isn't even a chance to misuse it.
Apple knows your location if any app uses the GPS.
On Android, even Google Android, you're free to use fully on-device maps that don't send your location to anyone, or you could use competing apps that don't send your location to Google. Similarly, you can install apps from an APK from anywhere without telling Google or anybody else that you've installed them, even on Google Android.
User control means privacy, not just better features.
So, de-googled then. You're using a different App Store/sideloading and disabling a load of the functionality in Google Maps (GPS is kind of useful for navigation)
GPS doesn't require Google. It just reads radio signals. Only Apple requires sending the result of analyzing those GPS signals back to Apple, even if you just want to use it to find your location on a map stored locally. Apple doesn't give you any options for privacy.
Assisted GPS is something literally every phone does, from every manufacturer. Without help from an external service, it would take up to half an hour to acquire a fix using GPS radio signals alone.
I have a friend just like you, who looks at something perfectly innocent that Apple does, screams “spyiiiiiing!” and runs into the arms of Google — a company famous for turning people into data products. That’s literally all they do. They don’t even know how to do anything else to make money.
Apple is a hardware company first and foremost that treats their users as customers, which is distasteful to you for some reason.
PS: Apple phones can acquire a GPS lock without cellular connectivity. I’ve relied on this feature many times in the Australian outback.
Oh, and you can turn Find My feature off if you’re that paranoid.
> Assisted GPS is something literally every phone does, from every manufacturer.
The difference between every other manufacturer and Apple is that every other manufacturer lets you turn it off if you care about privacy.
> Without help from an external service, it would take up to half an hour to acquire a fix using GPS radio signals alone
Up to. If you're under a rock and haven't previously gotten a location.
> Apple is a hardware company first and foremost
Apple is a marketing company first and foremost. Why give users control, the only way to actual privacy, when not giving them control lets you make more money off of them and marketing privacy will fool people into believing you offer actual privacy?
> PS: Apple phones can acquire a GPS lock without cellular connectivity. I’ve relied on this feature many times in the Australian outback.
And yet despite this, your iPhone will send your location back to Apple, including where you were while you were offline, as soon as it gets network connectivity.
> Oh, and you can turn Find My feature off if you’re that paranoid.
That doesn't stop Apple from getting your location.
You seem to believe I'm a Google apologist. You're wrong. I've criticized Google plenty on this forum. I'm a Firefox-using user control apologist.
Aye! What a flash in the pan that was! I remember being at SXSW in 2010 and people showing off this cool assistant app. A month later, Apple acquired it and then crickets.
When it was finally integrated into iOS, it could just barely set timers. What a waste of an amazing team.
I hate when I make these posts when I know something, and have to eat down votes for it. Believe what you will, but it's not true, not even close to true, or in the same ballpark as truth, and it's not some contentious half truth.
It's a bizarre wholly new rumor that should strike everyone reasonably acquainted with AI as trivially wrong, given timelines.
14 years here, I at least had come to expect common courtesy on what is asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.
Literally the only two things I can successfully use it for is setting timers and reminders. Nothing else works robustly.
You say you've worked in the Siri team for 14 years?
Print this out, roll it up, and bop your managers on the nose with it:
YOU'RE MISSING THE BOAT.
You haven't bought a ticket, and you're not even at the pier!
While you guys are still "thinking" about generative AI integration, millions of your users like me have switched to using the Open AI app because it actually understands what I'm saying and can answer usefully.
Just the voice recognition part of Siri alone is being absolutely blown out of the water by demos thrown together by individuals, not entire teams of people working at what is soon to be the former biggest company in the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfvLIEHwiyo
If I get a message from my Mum that's not in English, Siri used to say some hilarious verbatim English pronunciation of the words. Total gibberish.
The big improvement now is that she'll just say: "A message in a foreign language" or something to that effect. Simply refusing to do anything useful. The Open AI app can read the same text out loud to me, no problems.
How is that "improving over time"!? What are you guys doing over there? All I see is regressions.
Does the Siri team even have access to a single H100 card? A few dozen maybe? I haven't heard a peep about Apple buying anything from NVIDIA in the last year...
The forum post you linked doesn't even demonstrate what you claim, since users just a few posts in were showing Siri giving the correct answers. Testing just now, Siri still gives the correct answers.
I think it was actually demonstrating a different problem: Siri's inconsistency of answers. Sometimes you will ask Siri a thing, and it will get it right. Other times, the exact same query will give something totally different (and totally wrong).
Anecdotally, I've encountered this issue less and less over the year. IMO the public has a brain worm regarding Siri's badness that doesn't really match reality. I'm guilty of the same thing—and yet I constantly see people using Siri for things I would have bet money it couldn't do, successfully. Just recently I asked it a followup question, and it worked perfectly. I didn't think Siri could do that. I was stuck in ChatGPT mentality, or I wouldn't have even tried.
I am not claiming Siri is perfect. I am not claiming it's as good as anyone else (largely because I haven't tried the other voice assistants in a long time). I'm not even saying it's particularly good, let alone "good enough". Apple has dropped the ball, no question.
However, I am saying it's better than online sentiment would have you believe.
Siri's bad, that's not the same thing as the claim (there's an Apple executive who is so worried about AI becoming super intelligent that they hold it back)
I am not sure that was the intended reference; we know this behaviour now very well from neutering AIs, but I read the statement of gp as, like some of the AI neutering, but even more extreme, this Siri manager is trying to not offend anyone to such extreme that it makes a basically worthless product. Not to save the world from AI. I hope someone, in my lifetime, will make on-device LLMs which allow that type of neutering to be switched off. I don’t get offended and LLMs are getting far worse by trying to ‘protect the children’, not humanity.
Apple doesn't have the right kind of "vision" for what they could achieve with Siri, and they don't have the stomach for the type of risk-taking that it would take to get there even if they did.
If they did, we'd be hearing about Apple buying hundreds of thousands of GPUs, not Facebook.
Yes we are, and yes you are. It's right in the post.
"Apparently there's a senior exec in Apple that is even more of a puritan than the "AI safety" nuts and forced Siri to be dumbed down to prevent even the slightest risk of any impropriety.
With people like that in charge, innovation can't occur."
The Apple Maps 1.0 release was a complete shitshow but it has quietly gotten better than Google Maps by this point. But the average google maps user is still mentally living back in 2012 and still thinks that Apple Maps sucks as hard as it did at launch. Apple does improve its products over time. In this case though due to the problems with AI and everything from racist Tay bot to "DEI" google gemini issues they're going to be taking their time to avoid another Apple Maps launch. Institutionally they've learned from the Apple Maps launch and they aren't going to show you a half-baked product any more. If you misinterpret the lack of any visible progress to the consumer as lack of any progress you probably don't have a good mental model of how Apple operates. They also aren't likely to be dumb enough to just not even bother on working to improve their AI assistant with the last decade worth of improvements in DNNs/LLMs. And the "first mover advantage" usually isn't an actual advantage and its better to be second or third and copy what works and put a lot of polish on it. Siri itself is kind of proof of that (Friendster and MySpace are two other examples--there's lots of past HN topics on this). They don't need to leap into the LLM voice assistant space half baked in order to try to get ahead of everyone else--that is startup-which-will-eventually-get-bought/HN kind of logic, not actual market leadership logic.
Nah Apple maps still sucks where I live. Lots of small streets and alleys that are on Google maps are absent on Apple's. Locations are slow to be updated. Driving directions that are illogical to locals. Maybe it's better in Cupertino/New York, but not where I live.
What do you use your voice assistant for? I use Siri to set timers, set alarms, create reminders, identify songs (which uses Shazam), and turn on/off various smart devices around the house.
I use it mostly while driving to request specific songs. It is insane that in multiple cases, it has shown the song I asked for on the lock screen, changing from the previous track so I know it understood what I asked it for, and then plays something entirely random that I have never heard before and is not in my library. I don't know how that even happens, but it has happened multiple times. Siri is truly awful and they certainly don't need an LLM to make Siri functional but anything that drives it forward is welcome relief.
Specific example of Siri seemingly recognizing exactly what I said, but playing something totally different. (In this case it is another song from my library, but I'm not usually in a position to take a screenshot or record the screen when I'm driving.)
https://i.imgur.com/t9dnoTx.png
The problem I have is that the quality of dictation seems to drop precipitously when using something other than the microphone built into an iPhone. In my car, Siri and dictation feel like a bad tech demo; as soon as I disable Bluetooth, accuracy shoots back up again. (And I know for a fact that the hands-free in my car makes super clear phone calls.)
It was a representative example of a task type that randomly succeeds or fails without much reason.
Here’s an actual example I did last week: “how much does a gallon of gas weigh?” Response: open your phone to search the web. I just tried it again tonight and it gave the answer directly.
Tell me your secrets. I’ll practice it in your voice, your language, whatever.
I get a time about half the time, and then if I immediately ask how much left on the timer, Siri informs me there are no timers. Which then promptly goes off.
Yeah, back in 2011, I bought iPhone 4S, not 4, for exactly that, because of Siri. Expecting it to work as I imagined back then. Siri is still not there, 13 years / generations of iPhones later.
I feel like Apple is in kind of a different position to the rest of the big tech people and so they can't take generative AI so "lightly". Let me explain.
Millions of users use the iPhone. So many more than any hardware that Google might have. But here's the other caveat, Google, Microsoft and Amazon all have their own huge cloud infrastructure while Apple doesn't. This means if Apple were to make a push for generative AI like the rest of the companies are doing it would cost them a lot. Everyone with an iPhone will want to try it, it would be a huge launch.
So... what's the answer to this? Well, it's pretty obvious. Ship small and efficient models that might have much more limited capabilities but still might be good enough particularly if they're well integrated with the rest of the software. Basically make Siri much smarter and capable.
It's kind of what Google has started to do as well with their 8 pro. There's a couple features that run entirely on-device. It's pretty exciting if Apple manages to get something that feels good running on device; that's the kind of machine learning i'm excited about.
Apple has a massive cloud, but they don’t sell it or really want to sell it.
I think they’ll want local because it fits into their profit margins and pushes higher end hardware. Imagine really having a reason to buy an iPhone18Pro or whatever.
And I think llms will be able to scale digitally if they are compact enough to run locally (ie, Apple pays for development once, deploys it and then all operational costs are on the client). This is really different from openAI, and other cloud LLMs, where each user has a marginal cost to operate so requires a monthly recurring cost.
Apple does not have the scale of other major cloud providers, the fact they’re not in the cloud game having customers subsidize their cloud costs is why it would cost them a lot.
Definitely not as big as Amazon or Microsoft, but big enough to do whatever they want regarding AI. I’d expect the private cloud they operate is top 20 in the world just to support all their Apple saas offerings.
Apple will probably do a hybrid between local and server processing. They will definitely do local where possible but some processing will still need to be done on servers. Apple just signed a deal with Super Micro for a large number of servers.
i don’t expect Apple to focus on a clone of ChatGPT or Gemini. They are more likely to use it for photo operations, control of Siri, and to make each of their apps and features work better together.
The core professors involved in that startup are pioneers in shrinking model sizes while maintaining performance, they may have bought them out for that kind of ability
People were clamoring for early access to betas and buying seats on developer accounts just to get it. Their public beta program just endorsed it and also allowed them to send actual developer betas to developers ahead of the public betas.
> Apple has been using the public as their QA team for last many releases.
Are you referring to the Apple Beta Software Program? Would you rather them _not_ allow people to test their beta software so more bugs make it into the public release?
DarwinAI was started in 2017 by Waterloo professors and alumni and the company "focuses on improving the efficiency of printed circuit board assembly (PCBA) production for the electronics manufacturing industry with its visual quality inspection platform powered by artificial intelligence."
Yay! Hopefully that means I can tell Siri to list my Audible books, then tell it to play one. No need to deal with Audible's amazingly sluggish UI with VoiceOver. More seriously, I can't wait to see what the accessibility folks can do with gen AI. They were the first to use image classification AI to describe images, and they're super great at it!
So one review of your app, in the App store, can lead to acquisition of your startup. That is when you own a marketplace and have competitive advantage.
After Vision Pro, and recent news on auto, I am starting to wonder if Apple is too old to make anything good. They’re so behind in AI and they refuse to make key acquisitions. This corporate culture cuts both ways.
AI is heavily bottlenecked by hardware right now, the good stuff requires non-consumer GPUs, the hobbyist stuff requires high end gaming GPUs. The user wants to run these things locally.
Vision Pro is pretty fantastic. It never really made sense for Apple to get into automotive manufacturing, so it was good they shut that project down, and moved part of the team over to AI.
Specifically camera/lidar technology, sensing and making sense of the world around them. Also the realtime chip/OS almost certainly has crossover with the car since they need a RTOS as well.
Maybe they're concerned with the current limits of LLMs and hallucinations and don't want to provide a product that returns false information? Also AI is too general a term, we should be talking about specifics areas they could use specific technologies like NLP, machine learning, computer vision, etc
Oh man, I hate the new swipe keyboard! It tries too hard to select the next word the language model thinks is likely, and seems to disregard the actual swipes to get there.
That aside, Apple has been doing a lot of AI for quite a while now, and executing most of it very well.
Also, there was a ton of overlap from day 1. Battery tech, attention monitoring, LIDAR, object recognition, hands-free UX research, etc. Basically the only tech with no overlap is the ultra-dense screens and accompanying lenses.
Aren’t they running some GPT2 version in iPhone 15.
The also stopped this car thing and decided to move all the AI researches from the Apple car into implementing something for AI on AI for Apple devices
Not saying that’s cutting edge but there is more to the AI division than meets the eye.
I have low hopes for Apple AI to be relevant, and if it's forced to be relevant, it won't be good.
Apple is going to force people to use its crappy AI models for some BS reason. Some bullshit about privacy or whatever. It's so dumb, it will spell the end of their dominance of the device category in the US. The models have an extremely standardized, fungible interface, and Apple's not going to let OpenAI or whoever plug into their first party Siri or Messages or whatever text, vision and audio interfaces. It will be the most anti-consumer position to take, because it will prevent users from choosing the best models, not just the "most private" or "most X" or whatever aesthetic or subjective concerns users may have, and it will only take a while to impact consumers because Google is really shitty too.
When was the last time it made sense to pay attention to an iOS platform technology? Developers have chosen, for the most part, to make the specific platform concerns someone else's problem.
Maybe not since the Retina display has anything they have done really mattered to me specifically. I have "just" ignored Swift completely. MPS is cool and Apple Silicon is cool but it's not my problem, it's "just" yet another backend to the thing I actually want to use, like Torch or whatever. Same thing with Siri. Mobile Safari is perpetually deeply behind. Mobile Safari on iOS doesn't have WebXR, and they're aspiring to be an XR company. I ignored the Watch, and I'm pretty much ignoring the Apple Vision Pro, except for supporting it as a Unity target. In fact, even on the AVP and iPhone, all the innovation seemingly is being done in Unity, and maybe only because Epic is beefing with them.
I get that people write applications in Swift or whatever. But I don't think it necessarily makes any sense to do that. Just because something happens, doesn't mean it makes sense.
Apple doesn't give you access to any of the first party APIs, which is what developers actually want. The AI thing will be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
In fact, what piece of software of theirs do you like to use that you aren't basically forced to? Like if the private APIs Photos or Messages used were open to any third party app, well of course we'd all be using third party apps to save our camera photos and send messages with compatibility with people too low tech to use an App Store. Or maybe they would use alternatives.
This is just factually wrong, it has WebXR, I tested it myself on AVP recently. You just gotta enable a toggle in Safari settings once, and then you are able to consume any WebXR content just fine.
It might sound trite, but then don't consider it to "have it" if it's gated from general use on the basis that it doesn't work properly yet. After all, they released EyeSight and Personas as marquee features even though they don't work properly either.
But the situation with WebXR as a pure software development component is a bit simpler. Obviously Apple has the resources to fully develop and release WebXR if it was a priority. My guess is, they are playing their cards close to their chest on how open to make Vision Pro. They won't release WebXR until they've determined it's not a threat to their ambitions. That could be because they scale down their ambitions so it doesn't matter much any more, or alternatively, they successfully establish a fully closed / locked down ecosystem and aren't worried that WebXR could pose a threat.
The fact that you are oblivious to how many AI systems have been deployed over the past several years pre-ChatGPT and continue to run invisibly today without much hype or fervor is a testament to how relevant good AI/ML can be.
I would argue that AI-as-a-Product is a fairly recent development and probably why our expectations are skewed. I read most comments like yours as "if it's not AGI then its not even AI". Which is silly of course.
- There are a lot of pre-existing multi-modal LLMs that perform well.
- Their interface is essentially standardized. You could call it an API to AI models.
- Apple will utilize a standardized interface when developing and deploying their multi-modal LLM.
- The end user will not be able to "choose" "which" multi-modal LLM their end-user software on iOS devices will interact with.
- This is really bad, because Apple is not likely to make the best multi-modal LLM, or to have the best multi-modal LLM at all times, so it harms the end-user.
you heard it here first, rolling out ai features is going to cause all the developers to finally go galt and deprive apple of their valuable skills at telling other people to make new alloys (I guess in software terms that’s calling other people’s APIs lol)
(the ai features first rolled out like a decade ago bud, but even if they hadn’t that’s some peak wish-casting right there. It’s incredibly unlikely to ever actually happen, but because you’re so wrapped up in parasocial attachments towards/against these brands, it seems like a very real and possible idea! Another place it shows up a lot is “nvidia should/will stop releasing consumer gpus!” lol - people have been predicting that for years even before AI and it never made any sense even now, but certainly not back then. Just a Rorschach blot reflecting people’s desires back at them.)
I don't know, I'm not the only one making this bet. Maybe the Humane, or whatever device OpenAI is working on, aren't "It." But there's a chance, a little bit of a chance.
> It’s incredibly unlikely to ever actually happen
Opening up the first party APIs? We might have an alternative app store by the end of the year, in the EU, which I didn't think was likely either. Anything seems to be possible, suddenly.
There's a low possibility that Apple specifically will "solve the summer school scheduling problem," and a high possibility someone else will. If an Android phone lets me do that, "bud," I'm going to stop using an iPhone.
> Apple is going to force people to use its crappy AI models for some BS reason. Some bullshit about privacy or whatever.
Ah yes, I too dislike privacy or whatever.
/s
> In fact, what piece of software of theirs do you like to use that you aren't basically forced to?
Let's see, I use Mail, Calendar, Notes, and Books because they're good enough that I don't want to switch to something else. Final Cut Pro is excellent, I use it on both my Mac and my iPad.
My favorite piece of Apple software has to be Freeform I think. If I'm on a call with someone and need to sketch something out, I can just quickly open Freeform and do it from there. Even neater, I can open the same drawing on my iPad and use the Apple Pencil, which will sync in real time with the app on my Mac while on the call. And yeah Excalidraw exists, but Freeform has all of the nice Apple Pencil shortcuts that you can't get in Excalidraw.
