Leaked Apple meeting shows how dire the Siri situation is
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Re: Leaked Apple meeting shows how dire the Siri situation is
#2This problem of non-technical product folks over-promising features is going to get much worse in the age of LLMs. The models are incredibly adept at providing a proof-of-concept. But it's often a monumental endeavour to cross the gap between 70% and 90% accurcacy; 90%-95% even more. This long-tail pain isn't new, but the ability for non-technical folks to poke a model on a chat site and then assume their idea is ready to be deployed to production is a more recent phenomenon.
Re: Leaked Apple meeting shows how dire the Siri situation is
#3It seems there should be two intelligent agents Siri which takes commands and does them and then some other agent that is an llm that you can call up with a different call name. By separating the two you solve all the problems.
Re: Leaked Apple meeting shows how dire the Siri situation is
#4I have an android phone and switching google assistant to gemini made it worse for the fairly basic things I actually use google assistant for, like setting reminders, so I switched it back.
Are people really clamoring for AI in the voice assistant on their phone?
Re: Leaked Apple meeting shows how dire the Siri situation is
#5The basic problem here for Apple is that LLMs will never actually be able to avoid prompt injection issues, and the entire "personal awareness" set of functionality they're trying to make uses LLMs. Unless somebody at Apple invents a new state of the art, it's not going to happen.
With that said, I'm surprised they haven't yet at least replaced the 'dumb' Siri commands with something that's effectively an LLM translation layer for an internal API. That would get significantly better experience (even a dumb LLM is way better at understanding natural language directions than Siri) with no 'personal awareness' stuff needed.
Re: Leaked Apple meeting shows how dire the Siri situation is
#6I have an android phone and switching google assistant to gemini made it worse for the fairly basic things I actually use google assistant for, like setting reminders, so I switched it back. Are people really clamoring for AI in the voice assistant on their phone?
My Nest can still only get “ok google turn on the light” the second time I say it. Good shit!
Re: Leaked Apple meeting shows how dire the Siri situation is
#7I have an android phone and switching google assistant to gemini made it worse for the fairly basic things I actually use google assistant for, like setting reminders, so I switched it back. Are people really clamoring for AI in the voice assistant on their phone?
Yup, had to stop using it, next step was to get rid of Gemini altogether. It's so weird to claim you give people an advanced AI when actually you are removing a whole bunch of features.
Re: Leaked Apple meeting shows how dire the Siri situation is
#8It seems there should be two intelligent agents Siri which takes commands and does them and then some other agent that is an llm that you can call up with a different call name. By separating the two you solve all the problems.
But that doesn't match the marketing vision of the product and brand identity. /s
Re: Leaked Apple meeting shows how dire the Siri situation is
#9I have an android phone and switching google assistant to gemini made it worse for the fairly basic things I actually use google assistant for, like setting reminders, so I switched it back. Are people really clamoring for AI in the voice assistant on their phone?
> so I switched it back.
Google has helpfully decided that you don't actually want to do that:
https://blog.google/products/gemini/google-assistant-gemini-...
later this year, the classic Google Assistant will no longer be accessible on most mobile devices
Re: Leaked Apple meeting shows how dire the Siri situation is
#10I upgraded to an iPhone 16 in part because I was interested in the AI augments to iOS. My assumption was that Apple was likely to do something tasteful, and probably not nuclear-level bad in terms of privacy.
I've since disabled everything AI. My feeling is that my phone is much snappier without. Text summary features are pretty bad—in one case a summary of a text thread led me to believe my dad was having an acute health crisis when in fact it was a fairly benign discussion of news from doctors. Even custom emoji, which could have been fun, are simply bad.
Meanwhile some basic iOS features like "mute all notifications from this particular text thread" have been broken for me for several months.