201–210 of 380 posts
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.
From a technology or engineering perspective, I have no idea how to work with Apple.
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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.
Agreed. I often have to verbally battle with Siri to do the most basic interaction. Siri recognizes all my words but misinterprets my intent and does something I didn’t want.
Not to mention the iOS keyboard has gotten so bad in the last year that it took me 3x longer to type this comment (I use the swipe keyboard). I had to fix at least a dozen typos.
Every now and then when they screw up, they’ll have a mea culpa with the press. They haven’t done that with Siri or the keyboard yet.
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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 registe…
1. Apple is big enough that it needs to take care of edge cases like offline & limited cell reception, which affect millions in any given moment.
2. Launching a major UI feature (Siri) that people will come to rely on requires offline operation for common operations like basic device operations and dictation. Major UI features shouldn't cease to function when they enter bad reception zones.
3. Apple builds devices with great CPUs, which allows them to pursue a strategy of using edge compute to reduce spend.
4. A consequence of building products with good offline support is they are more private.
5. Apple didn't even build a full set of intents for most of their apps, hence 'remind me at this location' doesn't even work. App developers haven't either, because ...
6. Siri (both the local version and remote service) isn't very good, and regularly misunderstands or fails at basic comprehension tasks that do not even require user data to be understood or relayed back to devices to execute.
I don't buy that privacy is somehow an impediment to #5 or #6. It's only an issue when user data is involved, and Apple has been investing in techs like differential privacy to get around these limitations to some extent. But that is further downstream from #5 and #6 though.
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.
The iphone is so useful they can probably ride it for a couple more decades at least. I would still buy it. From a technology or engineering perspective, I have no idea how to work with Apple.
And for audio production - I'm just a dabbler, really, but I've been able to do some really impressive things with just GarageBand and a Fender Mustang Micro amp-plug over USB-C. It "just works" unlike my experience on Linux recently, where there are lots of little bits that are genius, but I couldn't manage to figure out how to get a basic midi synth working with a DAW that had a UI that was designed for humans. (Jack is amazing, though - being able to do arbitrary audio filter chains with random pieces of software is seriously cool.)
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> Unfortunate that JG is the fall guy for Siri... From TFA Some of the teams that Giannandrea oversaw will move to Sabih Khan and Eddy Cue, such as AI Infrastructure and Search and Knowledge. Khan is Apple's new Chief Operating Officer who took over for Jeff Williams earlier this year ... Apple CEO Tim Cook thanked Giannandrea ... Seems like Khan is preparing the mothership for when he eventually assumes the CEO role…
odd, why not Craig? he's by far the popular pick + probably actually right leader for apple's ai phase
The various interviews I've watched of his (and some of the leaked news) shows he's still quite deep in the tools.
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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.
Many users like myself enjoy a good manual and will lean into a CLI at every opportunity. This is absolutely counter to the value proposition of a natural language assistant.
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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.
Still. Idle hands, he should get back on that horse if he can. Go do more stuff.
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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.