11–20 of 533 posts
Risk aversion from immature tech is a part of Apple’s DNA. It should be no surprise that Apple declined to push Siri beyond its limited capabilities.
LLMs are quite new and Apple has plenty of cash to hire star devs to catch things up. Writing off Apple’s AI future is premature.
Can tell they downgraded the long range microphones somewhere between iPhone 4 and 7, might be even worse in later models because it really struggles to pick up you shouting across the room at it when it used to work pretty well on the 4. Then again the only thing I've used it for since launch is setting timers, rarely gets that right these days.
I don’t think the iPhone 4 had always on siri.
IIRC, "always on" Siri came with the 4s
Siri is fine at controlling smart home devices, giving weather, timers, etc...but if you ask it questions more times that not it wants you to use your phone. Google Home handled that so much better.
We have Apple Music and have Homepods around the house so we use it for that.
> The report today explains that Google wanted these three engineers “badly enough that its CEO, Sundar Pichai, personally wooed the group.” How do they conduct the interviews, in that situation? Not the usual tech megacorp brogrammer "technical interview" hazing?
I love my iPhone, it's a great device. However, quite literally the only two things I use Siri for are asking "what song is this?" and "set a timer for X minutes." I'm sure there are ways I could be using it for any number of things that might improve some routine process in my life, but I never found them.
"Turn off the Apple TV."
"Turn off low power mode."
"Stop navigating."
"Open [name of app I don't want to spend time finding in my iOS folders]"
"What song is this?" (Listens and usually is able to discover the name/artist of the song in the background.)
So when people say things like, "Siri is mostly useless," I think – wow, that is a very hyperbolic statement.
Siri is mostly useless. It works about half the time for me. When I ask it to do a task like create a timer, it works, but asking it questions is almost useless. One time I asked "What is a picometer?" and it gave an answer from Wikipedia, but then I immediately asked "What is a femtometer?" and it said it couldn't answer it on the iPhone. My wife gets amused whenever I use Siri because half the time I'll start swear…
At this point, they should just pipe the #1 search result into ChatGPT for a nice summary and have Siri read that out loud. It would be so much better.