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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

#61

Post by JadoJodo »

softwaredoug wrote: post #24
crooked-v wrote: post #5

The 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 transla…

I’m not sure I want / need an LLM for the handful of basic commands I want Siri to do in the car with no complication. Siri is good at some straightforward command patterns. And that’s how users have been trained. Adding an LLM feels like a solution looking for a problem

I have a pretty good grasp on Siri commands and it's still _terrible_. Here are a few from the past few weeks:

“Siri, drive to ” → “Now driving to .”

“Siri, send a message on .” → One of _two_ responses (seems random): “Sorry, I can't do that while you're in the car” OR “What would you like to say to ?”

“Siri, play ''.” → “Now playing .”

“Siri, remind me when I get home to .” → “Sorry, I don't have your address.” (My contact information, with complete address, is in my Apple Contacts, and set as my card.)

The list goes on. It's actually become somewhat of a game for my wife whether Siri will actually complete a given request.

Re: Leaked Apple meeting shows how dire the Siri situation is

#62

Post by CamperBob2 »

EPWN3D wrote: post #50
harrall wrote: post #12

I know Apple has been known to wait until a technology was very mature before putting it into a product, sometimes years after competitors had already done so. But Apple Intelligence seems like the complete opposite… like they had to have something now .

The same year the tech industry got taken by storm by LLMs, Apple announced a brutally expensive, niche VR/AR headset with no particular use case. That product was essentially DOA. I think this is the first time in decades where Apple took a step from their back foot. The Vision Pro announcement during the initial hype cycle of ChatGPT made it look like they were just totally out of step with the industry. It was a d…

Had they slept on the Vision Pro, I'm pretty convinced they could have credibly kept their powder dry on LLMs

No shortage of powder at Apple, it's safe to say.

Re: Leaked Apple meeting shows how dire the Siri situation is

#63

Post by walterbell »

napkin wrote: post #59
walterbell wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Had they slept on the Vision Pro 2025 versions of iOS, iPadOS and macOs are all being redesigned based on VisionOS, despite VisionPro production and successor cancellation.

Is there evidence Vision Pro production was ‘cancelled’ as opposed to just running its limited course as planned? Are there substantial leaks indicating its successor has been cancelled?

  Early 2024: Apple supplier says planned production cut by 50%
  Late 2024: Apple supplier says cheaper Vision Pro 2 (N109) cancelled
  Late 2024: senior executive moved from Vision Pro to Siri/AI team
  Early 2025: Bloomberg says tethered Apple AR glasses (N107) cancelled
There may be an SoC (e.g. M4/M5) refresh of existing Vision Pro 1 design.

Re: Leaked Apple meeting shows how dire the Siri situation is

#64

Post by KevinMS »

djohnston wrote: post #2

This 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 rea…

> But it's often a monumental endeavour to cross the gap between 70% and 90% accurcacy; 90%-95% even more.

That sounds exactly what we went through in the late 90's with voice recognition (remember dragon naturally speaking and via voice?).

Re: Leaked Apple meeting shows how dire the Siri situation is

#65

Post by cblum »

binarymax wrote: post #27

The personal context issue could have been solved long before LLMs appeared. My foil for this has always been the simple request from Siri: "Take me home". Apple and my device know where I live. I have even registered "home" in Apple maps. This is not a huge leap, and this is not even something that requires an LLM. But it does force the featureset and capability to be better. This was a problem in 2015. 10 years lat…

On a related note, I don’t know how Apple has managed to mess up so badly the idea of storing your own information like address, phone number, etc.

Every time I’ve moved, for months afterwards I keep having to fix my address when using Apple Pay or setting directions to home, etc. because it seems like they keep multiple copies of that information all over the place, instead of referring to a single piece of information.

Places I can think of where I’ve had to update my address one by one: each credit card I have associated with Apple Pay; Maps; my own contact that I can share with others; subscription information; shipping address for Apple Pay.

I get it that some people use separate billing and shipping addresses, but for the vast majority of people the use case is “I have a single home address where I want to direct Maps to, be billed at, and ship stuff to, please update it all at once when I update my address.”

Re: Leaked Apple meeting shows how dire the Siri situation is

#66

Post by napkin »

walterbell wrote: post #63
napkin wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there evidence Vision Pro production was ‘cancelled’ as opposed to just running its limited course as planned? Are there substantial leaks indicating its successor has been cancelled?

Early 2024: Apple supplier says planned production cut by 50% Late 2024: Apple supplier says cheaper Vision Pro 2 (N109) cancelled Late 2024: senior executive moved from Vision Pro to Siri/AI team Early 2025: Bloomberg says tethered Apple AR glasses (N107) cancelled There may be an SoC (e.g. M4/M5) refresh of existing Vision Pro 1 design.

This all doesn’t sound worth reading into. There are other interpretations to supplier leaks. Ditto re: execs moving between teams. Apple AR != Vision Pro. On the flip side Apple is still shipping updates, new content, and selling units. I’ll just wait and see.

Re: Leaked Apple meeting shows how dire the Siri situation is

#67

Post by walterbell »

napkin wrote: post #66
walterbell wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Early 2024: Apple supplier says planned production cut by 50% Late 2024: Apple supplier says cheaper Vision Pro 2 (N109) cancelled Late 2024: senior executive moved from Vision Pro to Siri/AI team Early 2025: Bloomberg says tethered Apple AR glasses (N107) cancelled There may be an SoC (e.g. M4/M5) refresh of existing Vision Pro 1 design.

This all doesn’t sound worth reading into. There are other interpretations to supplier leaks. Ditto re: execs moving between teams. Apple AR != Vision Pro. On the flip side Apple is still shipping updates, new content, and selling units. I’ll just wait and see.

It's true that 50% cut in production followed by a halt in production does not mean that Vision Pro development has stopped. A smaller number of employees could continue work and something could be released in a few years, like any R&D project.

In comparison, Meta smart glasses sold 2M units in 5 quarters. Essilor-Luxotica is increasing production to 10M units by the end of 2026. Perhaps to be expected at 90% lower cost than Vision Pro, but those volumes have kickstarted an app ecosystem for smart glasses, which has failed to materialize for the low-volume VisionPro.

If future 2027 Apple AR glasses appear with a subset of VisionOS, they will compete with incumbent products from Meta and Xreal. Some lessons learned and some apps developed for Apple AR could help Vision Pro and VisionOS, if Apple AR gains millions of users like Meta smart glasses.

Re: Leaked Apple meeting shows how dire the Siri situation is

#68

Post by FrequentLurker »

walterbell wrote: post #63
napkin wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there evidence Vision Pro production was ‘cancelled’ as opposed to just running its limited course as planned? Are there substantial leaks indicating its successor has been cancelled?

Early 2024: Apple supplier says planned production cut by 50% Late 2024: Apple supplier says cheaper Vision Pro 2 (N109) cancelled Late 2024: senior executive moved from Vision Pro to Siri/AI team Early 2025: Bloomberg says tethered Apple AR glasses (N107) cancelled There may be an SoC (e.g. M4/M5) refresh of existing Vision Pro 1 design.

> Late 2024: senior executive moved from Vision Pro to Siri/AI team

That executive is not having a good time...

Re: Leaked Apple meeting shows how dire the Siri situation is

#69

Post by walterbell »

FrequentLurker wrote: post #68
walterbell wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Early 2024: Apple supplier says planned production cut by 50% Late 2024: Apple supplier says cheaper Vision Pro 2 (N109) cancelled Late 2024: senior executive moved from Vision Pro to Siri/AI team Early 2025: Bloomberg says tethered Apple AR glasses (N107) cancelled There may be an SoC (e.g. M4/M5) refresh of existing Vision Pro 1 design.

> Late 2024: senior executive moved from Vision Pro to Siri/AI team That executive is not having a good time...

She may help schedule realigment with reality, https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/01/24/apple-intelligenc...

> Across Vorrath's many high-profile Apple projects, she has been known for keeping work on schedule, and for implementing rigorous bug testing. Consequently, her move to the Apple Intelligence and Siri team is likely to be because the project needs to be given more impetus.

Re: Leaked Apple meeting shows how dire the Siri situation is

#70

Post by seec »

krackers wrote: post #18
crooked-v wrote: post #5

The 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 transla…

All Apple needs to do is allow 3rd party apps to integrate with Siri, then use an LLM as a way to convert natural language into the set of allowed API calls. Basically similar what chatGPT does with function calling. And on osx, they should have already had a head start due to applescript integration everywhere in most apps. I have no idea why they're trying to reinvent the wheel with "Shortcuts" which is severely li…

Shortcuts takes precedence because it was originally created on iOS and TC want absolute convergence between the OS. They don't realize (or don't care) how restricting it is to go this route. To be honest that may be the desired result.

I have tried to use Shortcuts a few times, and if Automator could be frustrating, Shortcuts is even worse. It seems to have improved with th recent scripting additions, but in my opinion it doesn't a lot of sense. On the phone it seems only useful to make up for lacking software with mediocre voice assistant and on the desktop, it is very lacking and limited. Applescript is an obtuse language but at least it's a programming language still, with the Shortcut toolkit it seems like you need to approach everything in a roundabout way.

In any case, it shows the failing of Apple ideology of "easy" computing for everyone. At some point you need to admit that some things are going to need some learning and competency and the best thing you can do is provide tools to enable the competent user. Not create some Frankenstein thing and the incompetent won't understand better anyway.

Apple has really failed, chasing "simplicity" at the expense of actual usefulness. And this has permeated even the desktop OS which is just dumb.

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