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John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

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Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#91

Post by DrewADesign »

murermader wrote: post #85
DrewADesign wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Siri does what I need it to do Not true for me at all, it fails at the most basic tasks, sometimes even at tasks it has done before. Three examples: - "Timer 5 minutes" -> Loading spinner is shown. Siri disappears after a few seconds. No error, no confirmation. I then have to manually check if the timer was set or not (it was not). - "Turn on the lights in the living room" to which it responds "Sorry, I cannot do t…

Yeah that’s strange. I set timers constantly both at home and work and I can’t recall a single time it hasn’t worked. I periodically add things to lists without issue. I have zero experience using it in another language. Maybe their testing sucked for that?

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#93

Post by nostrademons »

next_xibalba wrote: post #64
joezydeco wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember Tellme. They had an 800 number for free information via speech query but, of course, it was also for training ala 411GOOG. Fun times.

I miss 411GOOG. It was fun and felt like a cool fusion of new and old tech.

Its purpose was to get training data for speech recognition. Once Google’s speech recognition was working reliably, there wasn’t much reason to offer the service got free.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#94

Post by drob518 »

DrewADesign wrote: post #87
drob518 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s extremely hit or miss for me. Sometimes it works and I’m amazed. Other times it fails to play my main playlist that I’ve played 1000 times before.

Huh. I’d love to see what their UX testing looked like. It clearly missed someone doing what you’re doing with it, sadly.

Yea, I’m boggled. At this point Siri should be able to parse and understand a wide variety of forms of the same command, but it still seems to fail. This should be doable even without LLMs.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#95

Post by singularity2001 »

twodave wrote: post #51
raincole wrote: post #46

So what is going on here? The reason is definitely not that Apple couldn't even train a small local LLM to power Siri, right?

Even with ChatGPT in play it’s not very good.

ChatGPT does not help with the system integration it's just an afterthought.

It could potentially help tremendously but for that they would need to understand the usefulness of LLMs and tool usage.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#96

Post by PlunderBunny »

markus_zhang wrote: post #34

The only usage of Siri to me is to set hot spot so that it doesn’t shut down itself in a few mins. (And BTW why the f does it do that?) But it has failed to switch on Hotspot recently so I don’t use it anymore.

'Hot spot' as in Settings->Personal Hotspot? I've had that enabled for more than 10 years, and could count the number of times I've found it off and had to turn it on again using one hand. Sounds like a regional/carrier-specific thing. I recall that in the early days, carriers could disable hotspot functionality on their network. I hear hotspot functionality is pretty broken on iOS 26 though.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#97

Post by aetherspawn »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #67
aetherspawn wrote: post #56

This new guy is from Microsoft, who have enshittified every product they own with AI, ads, zero privacy data exfiltration, cloud everything, no security framework whatsoever, and the like. I hope they don’t do anything remotely like that at Apple. I am completely okay with the Apple approach to date (privacy and late mover cost advantage over progress and burning money/raising prices). At this point, their investment…

I use Windows every day and see no AI anywhere. It's trivial to turn off (thankfully) and we wouldn't even hear about it if there wasn't an outrage industry around Microsoft.

Aside from all the 365 subscription prices turning into “+ Copilot” editions and silently going up in price like 20%, that you then have to access hidden flows to opt-out of, right?

Perhaps you are not getting it rammed down your throat because you’re not a business user? On personal editions one area where AI has been a failure is taking over the search bar, but you’re right, you can disable it.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#99

Post by singularity2001 »

estimator7292 wrote: post #60

Imagine an alternate reality where companies can do things like create voice assistants without the absolute, unquestionable requirement to not only be profitable, but to have infinite compounding growth forever. We'd have working voice assistants by now. We're held up by the incessant need to game "engagement" and seek rent. In reality users just want a goddamn voice interface to their phone. Set a timer, remind me…

We'd have working voice assistants if it wasn't for Apple Monopoly banning all apps that are "competition to Siri" and "asking for too many permissions" because sandbox is not compatible with system integration.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#100

Post by highwaylights »

epistasis wrote: post #49
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…

I get this pain with Apple in a bunch of different areas. The things they do well, they do better than anyone, but part of the design language is to never admit defeat so very few of the interfaces will ever show you an error message of any kind. The silent failure modes everywhere gets really frustrating.

I’m looking at you, Photos sync.

EDIT: just noticed this exact problem is on the front page in its own right (https://eclecticlight.co/2025/11/30/last-week-on-my-mac-losi...)

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