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John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

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Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#41

Post by sethops1 »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #17

From the outside looking in it really feels like Apple focused so much on privacy and now has no strategy of how to make that work with AI right now. People increasingly seem to forgo the idea of retaining the data for themselves because they find AI products so fascinating / useful that they're just not caring, at least for the moment. I think this might swing back in the favor of Apple at one point, but right now i…

If total invasion of privacy is the only way to make AI useful, then maybe it isn't useful?

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#42

Post by addaon »

DrewADesign wrote: post #21
sfblah wrote: post #11

Siri's awfulness really is a thing to behold. I haven't used an android phone in a while. For those users out there, does its voice assistant actually work?

Could you share a bit about your use case/experience? Siri does what I need it to do— send messages, create reminders and calendar entries, look up basic facts and cites the source, play music, add things to lists, etc. I’m curious if you’re trying to do things that I haven’t, or if you’re just having a very different experience with those same things? Or maybe just have higher expectations for it? Edit: why in gods…

The very first thing I tried when Siri was released -- "set an alarm for ten minutes before sunset" -- still doesn't work. "What time is sunset?" and "Set an alarm for 5:03 PM" both worked on day one, and still work. Zero progress.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#43

Post by yunwal »

DrewADesign wrote: post #21
sfblah wrote: post #11

Siri's awfulness really is a thing to behold. I haven't used an android phone in a while. For those users out there, does its voice assistant actually work?

Could you share a bit about your use case/experience? Siri does what I need it to do— send messages, create reminders and calendar entries, look up basic facts and cites the source, play music, add things to lists, etc. I’m curious if you’re trying to do things that I haven’t, or if you’re just having a very different experience with those same things? Or maybe just have higher expectations for it? Edit: why in gods…

I have never been able to play music with Siri. Even something as simple as “play this specific album” gets completely bungled.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#44

Post by DrewADesign »

cheeze wrote: post #27
sfblah wrote: post #11

Siri's awfulness really is a thing to behold. I haven't used an android phone in a while. For those users out there, does its voice assistant actually work?

It works pretty well for me, but doesn't do nearly what I'd expect. EG I can talk to it like I would chatgpt and it works well. But I can't be like "hey I want to get dinner with my wife on our anniversary, please book the best available option in my city for fine dining" It's still way better than Siri, which feels like a voice CLI to me (same as Alexa, which is very low quality IME)

I don’t think I’d want to talk to a voice assistant like that. Maybe it’s a generational thing? Things like that are ambiguous enough discussing them with human beings and a big part of things like voice assistants is understanding how it’s going to interpret and execute a response based on what I say to it.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#45

Post by eurekin »

npunt wrote: post #38
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #17

From the outside looking in it really feels like Apple focused so much on privacy and now has no strategy of how to make that work with AI right now. People increasingly seem to forgo the idea of retaining the data for themselves because they find AI products so fascinating / useful that they're just not caring, at least for the moment. I think this might swing back in the favor of Apple at one point, but right now i…

Was the failure really driven by privacy policy? Long term a privacy play is the right move. But right now, Siri's capabilities even underwhelm vis-a-vis a model with no understanding of user context that is just interpreting commands.

Yeah, I'm not buying that either/or framing too

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#47

Post by ecshafer »

elAhmo wrote: post #9

Siri is probably among the products which had the most exposure to users (probably a billion+ users throughout iPhone's history) without capturing that opportunity to actually do anything meaningful with the huge user base it got for free. A decade and a half is insane timeline in tech industry, and huge majority of users use Siri the same way today as 15 years ago, setting a timer or an alarm clock. If they had 0 im…

Siri is really a pretty useless product. Its annoying that sometimes I can say “siri is x y” and it will answer me but other times it will respond “sorry I cant google this while youre driving” or whatever response. I see no reason I cant say “siri read me the wikipedia page on the thirty years war”. Why cant I query with siri? “Siri where is the closest gas station coming up?” I basically only want siri whilst driving and half the features are turned off then.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#48

Post by fidotron »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #17

From the outside looking in it really feels like Apple focused so much on privacy and now has no strategy of how to make that work with AI right now. People increasingly seem to forgo the idea of retaining the data for themselves because they find AI products so fascinating / useful that they're just not caring, at least for the moment. I think this might swing back in the favor of Apple at one point, but right now i…

Yes, I think the question here is not so much why the old is leaving, but if anyone seriously expects the new guy to succeed any more? ex-Microsoft too, not exactly a great start.

What does seem slightly odd is Apple have probably saved billions by failing to be dragged into the current model war.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#49

Post by epistasis »

elAhmo wrote: post #9

Siri is probably among the products which had the most exposure to users (probably a billion+ users throughout iPhone's history) without capturing that opportunity to actually do anything meaningful with the huge user base it got for free. A decade and a half is insane timeline in tech industry, and huge majority of users use Siri the same way today as 15 years ago, setting a timer or an alarm clock. If they had 0 im…

Siri was also completely miscommunicated from the beginning. I could never get Siri to do what I wanted, because I didn't realize that it had a very strict and narrow menu, but it never communicated what that menu was, and had no way of saying "here are the 5 things you can tell me about." And then there were the network communication issues where you don't know why you're not getting a response, or if Siri is going to work at all.

Every few years I would try to use it for a few days, then quit in frustration at how useless it was. Accidentally activating Siri is a major frustration point of using Apple products for me.

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