“Hey Siri, call Kate”… “Calling Derek” (who I haven’t spoken to in 10 years).
John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
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Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yeah I can ask it to play specific editions of specific EPs named the same or similar thing to the albums or whatever and it rarely screws up. There’s got to be something significantly different in our approach. I wish I could test it.
Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
#113From 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…
People only want privacy if it doesn’t come at the cost of a good product. It’s not enough on its own.
Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
#114If this video is to believed, this is the result of internal Apple politics between the software engineering folks, and the AI folks, with the software engineering folks "winning" https://youtu.be/50XKNKGPWs8?si=nznI4ydFBT5pXfNa
If that’s true it would be quite interesting, as the AI folks are winning almost everywhere else in the software industry, notably at Google.
Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
#115Siri'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?
I use it almost daily, to set timers and alarms
I used to use it for that. A few months ago I got an Android system update and it no longer works for that. It just does web searches if I try. Now it's trying to push me into this thing where it takes a screenshot and tells me what's on the screen. I've never once cared about that.
Failing to find any way to get the alarm thing back, I turned off the entire assistant thing.
Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
#116Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
#117This is a serious question that's partially mine, but I'm asking because of all the comments here: Specifically, what HAS Apple done with Siri over 15 years?
Are there new functions I don't know about? I... can't think of anything else they'd add, but I literally do not understand what their engineers and managers working on Siri were doing on a daily basis. They must have been writing some code at some point. Did it just never launch? Am I simply ignorant?
Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
#118Siri 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…
The one God-damn thing I really liked using it for, "skip to next chapter" in CarPlay podcasts, they REMOVED.
Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
#119Siri 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…
> 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.
When it works!
I’ve spend days where it goes wonky and says something went wrong for anything I ask. How is it that with modern phones the voice recognition and whatnot isn’t running locally?
Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
#120Siri 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…
Alexa is in the same boat. Compared to old-fashioned finger-and-screen interfaces, maybe voice simply isn't a great way to interact with computers in the general case. It's inconvenient, unreliable, and even if it works quite slow. Yet you see companies continue to chase the dream in the current generative AI craze.
I get the sci-fi "wow" appeal, but even the folks who tried to build Minority Report-style 3D interfaces gave up after realizing tired arms make for annoyed users.