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…
It’s got worse in the past few years, I think thought they might have impeded it so that the waited for improvements were that much more apparent.
brief career timeline: 1980s - silicon graphics / general magic 1990s - chief technologist, netscape early 2000s - CTO Tellme (speech recognition) late 2000s - CTO Metaweb (knowledge graph) -> acquired into Google 2010s - Google head of Machine Intelligence, Search, Gmail Smart Reply, etc, then took over Google Search and ML driven ranking (BERT) 2018 -> SVP ML/AI Apple to merge Siri/Core ML/all AI offerings under on…
This is good context to add to the article, because he's basically at retirement age anyways. Depends a little on whether 1980s means "1980" or "1989" but with that resume I think he can afford retirement even if it's 1989 :)
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…
The tension is that there's a big chasm of utility from those things until you're compete-with-Google-Search levels of good. I feel like I heard there was an Amazon UX study that said weather, music, and alarms/timers are all people use Alexa for. And even with the best LLM, that's probably all you want out of a smart speaker.
A whole bunch of assistants have gotten way worse in the last decade by chasing features at the expense of utility. I don't care about whatever new feature my speaker has, but if it fails to play a song or check the weather, I'm PISSED.
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.
It sure what’s going on my side. Hotspot turns off almost as soon as there is no usage. I wonder if there is a way to debug that.
I remember when I was a kid having an old iPod touch that didn’t support Siri and having to jailbreak it, find some weird poorly documented package in Cydia, and download that suspect package on my device while entering some (in hindsight) equally suspect servers into some really hard to find text field in settings that somehow™ enabled that old iPod touch use Siri.
All of that to realize Siri was kind of boring. Funny thing is it’s been over a decade and it’s maybe 20% better than it was at launch. MAYBE.
I don’t want to blame this one guy for all of that, but part of me can’t help but point at the leader and ask “you couldn’t have done better than… that?”
This is just the conversational interface issue. You need the system to be able to do most of the things you would expect a human to be able to do (e.g. if you're talking to your phone, you'd expect it to be able to do most phone things). If the conversational system can only do a small subset of those, then it just becomes a game of "discover the magical incantation that will be in the set of possibilities", and bec…
> once you give them enough tools are there solutions to the error rates when picking from dozens or even hundreds of tools i'm not aware of?
Yes, there are a few. Anthropic released one just last week.
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…
Honestly, my experience with Siri is that it works worse than it did 10 years ago. It's not clear to me if that's with Siri itself or just the general decrease in quality of Apple software over the past N years, but zero changes would have been an improvement. Things that seemed to work reliably for me 10 years ago but now do not: 1. "Call mom". Siri has apparently forgotten who my mother is. I tried "Hey Siri is my…
Hey I tried to use Siri to call my mom ~half a week ago and it said it didn't know who my mother was. I did find it weird since although I don't use Siri much, I was almost certain I've had success with that exact same request before, and haven't changed my contacts recently.
If 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.
I can believe that this is a case of the Software Engineering team being effective in a way that the AI/ML team wasn't. Apple's internal culture is notoriously closed and secretive, not the best way to approach cutting-edge AI research, especially when it wasn't their core competency in the first place.
But mainly I wanted to share that video because Craig Federighi calling the AI/ML team "AI/MLess" is one heck of a burn
Supposedly the main blocker for launching is because Apple would consider it reputational damage if the AI hallucinates. They have a very conservative approach when it comes to LLMs (on the other hand they are happy to scan all your photos and messages in the guise of child safety and send the data to the government and ChatControl). Problem is, Siri is already damaging Apple's reputation with how useless it is..
I remember buying the iPhone 4S in 2011, and it being the first iPhone to ship with Siri. It's 2025, and Siri is still fundamentally useless.
no, it's very useful for setting timers and for setting garbled reminders for a soon enough time that I'll remember what I actually meant rather than being confused by whatever it spewed out instead!
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?
The current situation on Google's Android Pixel phones is odd. The old non-LLM Google Assistant works well in a limited domain: Things like setting alarms, phoning by name, etc. It's similar in scope to Siri, but with better voice recognition, and better context awareness. However, Google is desperate to kill Google Assistant and force all Pixel users to use Gemini instead. Gemini 3 is a very good LLM, and far, far, far more versatile than Google Assistant. But Gemini won't do the simple things as reliably as the old Assistant. Setting an alarm works maybe 90% of the time with Gemini. If you asked the old Assistant "What time is it?" it would respond "It's 4:40 PM". If you ask Gemini "What time is it?" it will sometimes respond "It's 4:40 PM CDT in {your city}", but sometimes it will say "It's four four zero Pee Em in {your city}" and sometimes it will do a web search. Results are spotty in other areas like voice dialing. I've retained the old Assistant, because I want to do the basic things far more often than I want to verbally vibe code. But rumor has it Google is going to disable the old Assistant in March, forcing all users onto Gemini for voice commands. Unless Gemini gets much better at handling simple tasks by then, Pixel users will end up with a voice assistant much more frustrating than Siri.