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Build your own Siri locally and on-device

thehyperplane.substack.com

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Re: Build your own Siri locally and on-device

#12

Does Apple even allow you to replace Siri with another assistant? For the longest time on android, all non-Google assistants were crippled by not being able to listen in the background or use the assistant hardkey, gestures, or shortcuts. I'm not sure if the Google assistant still has privileges others don't, but I wouldn't be surprised in the least.

More or less. This is what Perplexity does.

Re: Build your own Siri locally and on-device

#13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crappy? Dude, Siri at one point couldn't even tell you what today's date was. The bar is on the ground.

I do not know if it is because I have been trained to make simple requests, but there are only a half dozen things I would verbally ask a robot. - time of day - calendar date - weather - set a timer - simple math calculation That’s 90% of the functionality right there.

Funny you mention this. My usage is the same. I suspect we’ve all been trained to expect little-to-nothing from these assistants.

Re: Build your own Siri locally and on-device

#14
I love the idea and I would like to build something like this. But the few attempts i have made using whisper locally has so far been underwhelming. Has anyone gotten results with small whisper models that are good enough for a use case like this?

Maybe I've just had a bad microphone.

Re: Build your own Siri locally and on-device

#15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crappy? Dude, Siri at one point couldn't even tell you what today's date was. The bar is on the ground.

I do not know if it is because I have been trained to make simple requests, but there are only a half dozen things I would verbally ask a robot. - time of day - calendar date - weather - set a timer - simple math calculation That’s 90% of the functionality right there.

And incredibly it manages to get those wrong a non-trivial amount of the time.

Re: Build your own Siri locally and on-device

#16

Does Apple even allow you to replace Siri with another assistant? For the longest time on android, all non-Google assistants were crippled by not being able to listen in the background or use the assistant hardkey, gestures, or shortcuts. I'm not sure if the Google assistant still has privileges others don't, but I wouldn't be surprised in the least.

Part of the problem is the wake word “hey siri” is actually handed by a separate coprocessor (AOP) with the model compiled into the firmware. While anything is technically possible, it isn’t as simple as just letting the google app run in the background since the AP is asleep when any of these gesture happen. You could probably setup the action button on the side to open an assistant, but that’s going to be a less pleasant experience (app might not be open, etc).

Details are listed below

https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/hey-siri

Re: Build your own Siri locally and on-device

#18

This is great, thanks for putting this together. Haven't followed it through yet, but does this model run successfully on an iPhone? My 9 year old ran a Qwen 0.6B model using ollama quite well, anything else was too slow to offer a good UX.

MLC[0] indicates that it can run models in the 8B range on iOS, but 1-3B sounds more reasonable to me.

[0] https://llm.mlc.ai/docs/deploy/ios.html#bring-your-own-model

Re: Build your own Siri locally and on-device

#20

This is great, thanks for putting this together. Haven't followed it through yet, but does this model run successfully on an iPhone? My 9 year old ran a Qwen 0.6B model using ollama quite well, anything else was too slow to offer a good UX.

Oh, a nine year old PHONE.

I was thinking there was a fourth grader out there deploying models when at that age I was still learning multiplication tables.

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