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John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

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Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#191

Post by AgentMatt »

the_snooze wrote: post #146
kshacker wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> voice simply isn't a great way to interact with computers in the general case You know I have talked to chatGPT for maybe a 100 hours over the past 6 months. It gets my accent, it switches languages, it humors. It understands what I am saying even if it hallucinates once in a while. If you can have chatGPT level of comprehension, you can do a lot with computers. Maybe not vim level of editing, but every single func…

I think the utility of voice commands is marginal at best in a car. In isolation, voice commands don't make sense if you have passengers. You basically have to tell everyone to shut up to ensure the car understands your commands over any ongoing conversation. And in the context of old fashioned knobs and buttons, voice is seriously a lot of complex engineering to solve problems that have long been non-issues. Not to…

Modern cars have several microphones or directional microphones and can isolate a speaker.

I think well-done voice commands are a great addition to a car, especially for rentals. When figuring out how to do something in a new car, I have to choose between safety, interruption (stopping briefly) or not having my desires function change.

Most basic functions can be voice-controlled without Internet connectivity. You should only need that for conversational topics, not for controlling car functions.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#192

Post by shagie »

npunt wrote: post #38
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #17

From 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…

Was the failure really driven by privacy policy? Long term a privacy play is the right move. But right now, Siri's capabilities even underwhelm vis-a-vis a model with no understanding of user context that is just interpreting commands.

It was driven by privacy and on device compute.

Anything you ask an Android device to do, or an Alexa device goes to their clouds to be 100% processed there.

Apple tried to make a small and focused interface that could do a limited set of things on device without going to the cloud to do it.

This was built around the idea of "Intents" and it only did the standard intents... and app developers were supposed to register and link into them.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/intents

Some of the things didn't really get fleshed out, some are "oh, that's something in there?" (Restaurant reservations? Ride Booking?) and feels more like the half baked mysql interfaces in php.

However, as part of privacy - you can create a note (and dictate it) without a data connection with Siri. Your "start workout" command doesn't leave your device.

Part of that is privacy. Part of that is that Apple was trying to minimize its cloud spend (on GCP or AWS) by keeping as much of that activity on device. It wasn't entirely on device, but a lot more of it is than what Android is... and Alexa is a speaker and microphone hooked up to AWS.

This was ok, kind of meh, but ok pre-ChatGPT. With ChatGPT the expectations changed and the architecture that Apple had was not something that could pivot to meeting those expectations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Intelligence

> Apple first implemented artificial intelligence features in its products with the release of Siri in the iPhone 4S in 2011.

> ...

> The rapid development of generative artificial intelligence and the release of ChatGPT in late 2022 reportedly blindsided Apple executives and forced the company to refocus its efforts on AI.

ChatGPT was as much a blindside to Apple as the iPhone was to Blackberry.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#193

Post by crooked-v »

quenix wrote: post #177
zeristor wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does anyone have an actual technical theory of how it’s possible for commands that used to work , say a month ago, to just stop working? What is it about Siri’s architecture that causes “Set bedroom light to 30%”, a command that worked for years, to randomly stops working on a random Tuesday with no OS update or home change? I mean, what on earth are they doing on the back end…?

For me, the standout was a period of 6 months or so when Siri stopped understanding the world "half" (as in "lights to half"), and thne it abruptly started working again.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#194

Post by thevillagechief »

fidotron wrote: post #52
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…

Google Now. It's even completely gone and forgotten.

Oh the things they could have done with Google Now. I want to know the story behind it's death if any insiders are lurking around.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#195

Post by dhussoe »

QuercusMax wrote: post #175
thatjoeoverthr wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In game design we used to call this opacity “hunt the verb” in text adventures. All chat bots suffer this flaw. GUIs solve it. CLIs could be said to have it, but there is no invitation to guess, and no one pretends you don’t need the manual.

For CLIs - most reasonable commands either have a `-h`, `--help`, `-help`, `/?`, or what have you. And manpages exist. Hunt the verb isn't really a problem for CLIs. And furthermore - aren't there shells that will give you the --help if you try to tab-complete certain commands? Obviously there's the issue of a lack of standardization for how command-line switches work, but broadly speaking it's not difficult to have…

the comment you're replying to said:

> but there is no invitation to guess, and no one pretends you don’t need the manual

which is basically what you're saying too? the problem with voice UIs and some LLM tools is that it's unclear which options and tools exist and there's no documentation of it.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#196

Post by pxtail »

thatjoeoverthr wrote: post #154
epistasis wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In game design we used to call this opacity “hunt the verb” in text adventures. All chat bots suffer this flaw. GUIs solve it. CLIs could be said to have it, but there is no invitation to guess, and no one pretends you don’t need the manual.

Very well written, I'm wondering when current "cli haxxxor assistant" FAD will fade away and focus will move into proper, well thought out and adjusted to changed paradigm IDEs instead of wasting resources. Well, maybe not completely wasting as this is probably still part of discovery process.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#197

Post by npunt »

bangonkeyboard wrote: post #188
QuercusMax wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For CLIs - most reasonable commands either have a `-h`, `--help`, `-help`, `/?`, or what have you. And manpages exist. Hunt the verb isn't really a problem for CLIs. And furthermore - aren't there shells that will give you the --help if you try to tab-complete certain commands? Obviously there's the issue of a lack of standardization for how command-line switches work, but broadly speaking it's not difficult to have…

> For CLIs - most reasonable commands either have a `-h`, `--help`, `-help`, `/?`, or what have you. And manpages exist. Hunt the verb isn't really a problem for CLIs. "Hunt the verb" means that the user doesn't know which commands (verbs) exist. Which a neophyte at a blank console will not. This absolutely is a problem with CLIs.

Discoverability is quite literally the textbook problem with CLIs, in that many textbooks on UI & human factors research over the last 50 years discuss the problem.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#198

Post by natch »

dboreham wrote: post #153
reactordev wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But those stock options and benefits were excellent… /s Honestly he’s had one hell of a career. Even if Siri sucked.

Full disclosure: I've known jg since 1986. I have no insight into the Apple goings on, but the story that "he's the guy that made Siri suck" sounds very very unlikely to me.

He's not the guy who made it awesome, that much is known.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#199

Post by labrador »

andy_ppp wrote: post #125

My theory that Apple are becoming Yahoo! keeps being proven true honestly. They have some massive advantages to build really incredible AI tools, infrastructure and hardware but they refuse to take it because they are fascinated by pointlessly making their UI look transparent.

It's ironic because Microsoft took their eye off smart phones to make Windows 8 transparent aqua interface

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#200

Post by natch »

baggy_trough wrote: post #127
kulahan wrote: post #117

This 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…

They changed it from responding to "Hey Siri" to just "Siri".

And then there was that world-changing delivery of sports scores on demand.
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