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Siri AI

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501–510 of 746 posts

Re: Siri AI

#501
post #144

The demo Mike Rockwell gave at WWDC was interesting. He kinda showed off Siri as like the Star Trek computer for your phone. I hope this is the direction Apple is going to continue in. Having AI as a user interface is way more interesting than chat bots, image editors, or copy editing.

Will it change iOS Settings for me that are hard to find by me just describing what I want? Or things like: delete every app I haven’t used in 6 months?

I have found that asking Siri to "ask ChatGPT" was enough 99% of the time for me and solved the discoverability problem that I had with my previous phones.

I think that we are now in the realm of diminishing returns regarding these chat assistants.

Re: Siri AI

#502
post #438

It's interesting how anemic the use cases seem to be - we see the same things recycled over and over: "reword my email", "remove object from picture", "add a reminder", "summarise my text message which was already only 20 words long" etc etc. As if these are the major problems in people's lives. I really feel like there's a fascinating valley of death between simple things that actually work and things of real value…

Spot on! I am also under the impression that the LLM tech is plateauing before bringing the promised productivity. Great as a coding assistant, great a summarizing a text, translating, great a helping plan a trip... But for the rest, e.g. act as a life assistant, it is still far off with no hope to reach the desired performance level. I would not be surprisd to see OpenAI and the likes to start reverting to Siri v1 s…

Why this is surprising? LLM-s are good in text generation on the base of the stuff they were trained on. Software is text generation, translation is text generation, LLMs can answer questions since billions were spent on tuning foundation models, that is people were collecting in (semi)automatic way questions with answers to the point we might think that LLM-s are "thinking".

Now people want to handle car rental. What are the relevant data that models were trained on for this kind of application? For Python code there is kirjillion examples on Github, for mathematical proofs there is endless stream of papers, books, etc. But for car rental? Mostly adds in the internet that want to trick you into a bad deal. So yes, LLM will be a disappointment, as it tries, well, to trick you into a bad deal. In addition, data are rather scarce so there will be a lot of hallucination, as it gets mixed up with yacht rental, bikes rental, ski equipment rental, etc.

Re: Siri AI

#503
I've not seen anyone discuss yet what kind of impact these AI features are likely to have on battery life. If they are running small on-device models, this will have a measurable impact on battery life with regular usage.

Re: Siri AI

#504
post #438

It's interesting how anemic the use cases seem to be - we see the same things recycled over and over: "reword my email", "remove object from picture", "add a reminder", "summarise my text message which was already only 20 words long" etc etc. As if these are the major problems in people's lives. I really feel like there's a fascinating valley of death between simple things that actually work and things of real value…

All you're saying is that (the harness you're using for) Gemini sucks. OpenAI has their own web browser to fill out forms with and Claude has a whole Cowork feature that interacts with you computer including your web browser.

If new Siri still sucks, well, it's sucked the entire time. The worst of it is the security aspect where the setting to let you use Siri without authenticating hasn't worked since they added it! (still broken, iOS 26.5)

Re: Siri AI

#505
post #438

It's interesting how anemic the use cases seem to be - we see the same things recycled over and over: "reword my email", "remove object from picture", "add a reminder", "summarise my text message which was already only 20 words long" etc etc. As if these are the major problems in people's lives. I really feel like there's a fascinating valley of death between simple things that actually work and things of real value…

"I got the top tier of Gemini AI." - that's your issue, get a subscription to a lab offering actual frontier models like Anthropic and OpenAI.

Nonsense.

https://livebench.ai/#/?highunseenbias=true

Re: Siri AI

#506
post #438

It's interesting how anemic the use cases seem to be - we see the same things recycled over and over: "reword my email", "remove object from picture", "add a reminder", "summarise my text message which was already only 20 words long" etc etc. As if these are the major problems in people's lives. I really feel like there's a fascinating valley of death between simple things that actually work and things of real value…

For fun I planned a holiday entirely with LLM's lately, and followed through. It used good models and did a lot of searching, including searches in other languages. It got nothing right, riddled with fake places and times. It also found some weird and unique places I never would have considered. I had a blast, brought me back to traveling pre-internet, requiring a level of spontaneity I had forgotten we used to depen…

That was funny, thank you.

I am now reminded of a short trip with less tech savy folks, where I also on the trip noticed that the plan was a bit .. not working. And the person organizing it complaining to the bus driver, why they were not going what the internet told him, they were going. The internet being ChatGPT.

Re: Siri AI

#507
post #438

It's interesting how anemic the use cases seem to be - we see the same things recycled over and over: "reword my email", "remove object from picture", "add a reminder", "summarise my text message which was already only 20 words long" etc etc. As if these are the major problems in people's lives. I really feel like there's a fascinating valley of death between simple things that actually work and things of real value…

For fun I planned a holiday entirely with LLM's lately, and followed through. It used good models and did a lot of searching, including searches in other languages. It got nothing right, riddled with fake places and times. It also found some weird and unique places I never would have considered. I had a blast, brought me back to traveling pre-internet, requiring a level of spontaneity I had forgotten we used to depen…

I found that Deep Research mode in Gemini was able to give me a well planned 4 day trip to a major city.

I told it my preferences and of the group members, where we arrived and departed, at what times. I gave it my itinerary and then asked it to plan two new itineraries and also suggest a location to book a hotel that was convenient for the early flight on the last day.

I went away for 20 mins and gave me a 20 page document with a good summary and decent options. I did choose some of the activities it suggested.

I did this 10 months ago. It’s probably better now.

But Gemini has access to google maps, so it can estimate travel times, and know which lunch places are near which sites and which hotels have good reviews. So if you want AI to work for travel panning you need to ground it in good data.

Re: Siri AI

#508
post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few years ago, the ability to do anything other than a timed walk on my watch with Siri broke. I used to be able to do things like say, “start a 3 mile walk” or “start a 200 calorie walk” and then the latter stopped working and then the former stopped letting me do non-integer numbers of miles and then nothing at all and now I cannot do anything other than start an unmeasured walk or a timed walk with siri and I’m…

Google did the same bullshit on Android. With Google Assistant (old assistant) I could say "Hey Google, play daft punk" and it would start playing Daft Punk on Spotify. With Gemini (new assistant) it says "sorry I cannot play music, but here are links to services where you can find Daft Punk albums". Fortunately at the moment you can still toggle between them. I guess not for long though.

I can't even get Gemini to properly call somebody - it is a mess.

Re: Siri AI

#509
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the EU case, Apple weaponizes people's ignorance about regulation. Apple pretends that the features everyone else has been shipping left and right somehow need extra paperwork and special approvals, because (…checks notes…) pro-privacy EU laws let zero-privacy competitors sail through, but block implementations that offer more privacy!? What's really happening is Apple unilaterally withholding features while makin…

I don't think it's unfair to say that the EU scrutinizes Apple (and a few other megacorps) a great deal more than most other companies. Some zero-privacy competitors might be sailing by right now simply because they aren't already caught up in the EU's red tape. Which isn't to say Apple doesn't also wield that red tape as their own bargaining chip, like you said.

Looking closer at products of megacorps is actually exactly the point of what the EU is doing - that's where the "gatekeeper" classification comes in. In order to allow a fair competition for smaller companies, dominant companies need to make sure they offer interfaces for other products. In this case, since so many people have iPhones, they are told to offer the possibility for other AI vendors to offer a replacement model instead of forcing the lock-in to Apple(Google)'s model on the device. That doesn't necessarily impact the privacy at all, unless a user would knowingly (or ignorantly) choose a less privacy-preserving alternative. Which while some users may make a wrong choice, should be their choice to make nonetheless.

Re: Siri AI

#510
post #438

It's interesting how anemic the use cases seem to be - we see the same things recycled over and over: "reword my email", "remove object from picture", "add a reminder", "summarise my text message which was already only 20 words long" etc etc. As if these are the major problems in people's lives. I really feel like there's a fascinating valley of death between simple things that actually work and things of real value…

I get the impression Apple designers don't actually use AI, and so have no idea what to build, since users don't know what they want from AI yet either.
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