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."
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.