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Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

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11–20 of 407 posts

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#11
Notification and mail summaries definitely nice to have, thought I can live without that.

What I'd really love to have is Siri superpowered with contextual natural language capabilities and multi-commands in a natural sentence. It _is_ getting there: Siri is better than it used to be and has somewhat of a contextual knowledge so far (compared to zero, before the update) but it's not there yet. It sometimes fails miserably. It should get to LLM-level contextual "memory" to be acceptable IMO.

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#12

Slightly off-topic because it’s for MacOS, but the new Image Playground has been fantastic for generating assets while I’ve been prototyping a new game.

I guess the point is: even fantastic AI products are often not useful to the majority of people.

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#13
post #2

Apple has tons of user engagement data. You would think they would have a heatmap showing them where their customers are spending a lot of time trying to accomplish a task. I would focus Apple Intelligence, amongst other tools, to reduce the time needed to accomplish that task. If I were the PO, that's how I'd proceed. I'd want my customers to be able to reduce the time they're spending using the phone and yet gettin…

The most useful thing for AI on an operating system level is in my opinion aggregation and summarization of data from different apps. And somehow connecting the different apps in a smart way. Like the iOS Shortcuts app, but with dynamically creating shortcut pipelines and much more powerful.

Probably not an easy task at all.

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#14

Notification and mail summaries definitely nice to have, thought I can live without that. What I'd really love to have is Siri superpowered with contextual natural language capabilities and multi-commands in a natural sentence. It _is_ getting there: Siri is better than it used to be and has somewhat of a contextual knowledge so far (compared to zero, before the update) but it's not there yet. It sometimes fails mise…

That’s supposed to come with 18.3/4

https://www.macrumors.com/2024/12/11/apple-intelligence-feat...

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#15
We have a family friend who is blind and a programmer. It's interesting to hear his perspective. His hope and expectation are that it will greatly increase usability.

I've been thrown into the usability deep end due to my wife also losing her sight due to an autoimmune disorder, and my dad losing his sight due to Macular Degeneration. Honestly, it sucks, and I mean like rage quitting, phone throwing sucks. (Try it. Turn on voice assist and close your eyes.) If Apple can improve it through AI, where someone can just talk to the phone to do a series of tasks. It will honestly change everything. The number of aging people who are going to lose their vision in the U.S. is set to go up exponentially in the coming years. This could be an unprecedented win for them, if they solve this issue with AI.

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#16
I was considering enabling it, and I could see the features being useful for some people, but not for me.

For example, notification summaries. If someone has apps blasting them with notifications, summarizing them into fewer more meaningful ones could be truly helpful. But for me, I’ve carefully managed my notifications. I get almost none. Every single one that is enabled is important and actionable. I don’t need to summarize what’s already small.

The writing help is another example. Maybe a person is a slow typist. Maybe they are losing a lot of time thinking of what to write, or how to word something. Maybe they are writing in a language in which they are less than perfectly fluent. In those cases the Apple Intelligence can be truly helpful. None of those are me, so I disabled it.

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#19

This is emblematic of the LLM race in general. We’re actively pressured to use co-pilot at work, and it’s crammed into every Microsoft product. I’m thankful that my iPhone is old enough not to use LLMs. Companies are afraid of being left behind in the new arms race, but that doesn’t actually mean that the technology actually present use-cases which most people need. (Worse are the meeting summaries or emails which ar…

> We’re actively pressured to use co-pilot at work

Unless you work at Microsoft, that's really interesting to me. Can't say I've ever experienced a boss pushing for me to use a certain developer tool.

Re: Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

#20

Slightly off-topic because it’s for MacOS, but the new Image Playground has been fantastic for generating assets while I’ve been prototyping a new game.

Image Playground is available for iPhones too. I haven't used it on the Mac yet. But I've send people their AI generated images and everyone's been pretty impressed by it
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