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John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

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Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#211

Post by squidsoup »

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…

> 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.

Also quite good for making shopping lists, with some bonus amusement when you get a weird transcription and have to try to work out that "cats and soup" is "tonkatsu sauce" several days after you added it to the list.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#212

Post by PunchyHamster »

the_snooze wrote: post #120
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…

Alexa is in the same boat. Compared to old-fashioned finger-and-screen interfaces, maybe voice simply isn't a great way to interact with computers in the general case. It's inconvenient, unreliable, and even if it works quite slow. Yet you see companies continue to chase the dream in the current generative AI craze. I get the sci-fi "wow" appeal, but even the folks who tried to build Minority Report-style 3D interfac…

It's great interface when your hands are doing something else so I do see the appeal.

Just that... nobody is willing to pay much for a thing that will do some basic search, dictate a recipe, or do unit conversion, or add a thing to a list.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#213

Post by raspasov »

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…

Because almost no one (outside of accessibility needs) truly needs or wants to use voice to control their device. It’s one of the few UX fetishes that refuses to die.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#214

Post by perryizgr8 »

the_snooze wrote: post #120
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…

Alexa is in the same boat. Compared to old-fashioned finger-and-screen interfaces, maybe voice simply isn't a great way to interact with computers in the general case. It's inconvenient, unreliable, and even if it works quite slow. Yet you see companies continue to chase the dream in the current generative AI craze. I get the sci-fi "wow" appeal, but even the folks who tried to build Minority Report-style 3D interfac…

Alexa has this annoying habit of being non-deterministic.

> Alexa, turn on the bedroom lights.

> OK lights turn on

In the evening:

> Alexa, turn on the bedroom lights.

> I'm sorry, I don't know a device called "bedroom lights".

How is it even possible to build a computer system that behaves like this?

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#215

Post by dididn284d »

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.

I think this is a naming problem. CLI is usually the name for the interface to an application. A Shell is the interface to the OS. Nonetheless agree with your post but this might be part of the difficulty in the discussion

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#216

Post by joecool1029 »

highwaylights wrote: post #100
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…

I get this pain with Apple in a bunch of different areas. The things they do well, they do better than anyone, but part of the design language is to never admit defeat so very few of the interfaces will ever show you an error message of any kind. The silent failure modes everywhere gets really frustrating. I’m looking at you, Photos sync. EDIT: just noticed this exact problem is on the front page in its own right ( h…

> The silent failure modes everywhere gets really frustrating.

I literally just experienced this with RCS failing to activate. No failure message, dug into logs, says userinteractionrequired. Front page of HN, nobody knows, apple corp response, 'thats interesting no you cant talk to engineering'.

Read the RCS spec definition document to fall asleep to after the board swap and the call saying they won't work on it since issue resolved, answers exactly what that meant, Apple never implemented handling for it, my followup post: https://wt.gd/working-rcs-messaging

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#217

Post by wnevets »

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…

People really thought Siri was what LLM chat bots are today.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#218

Post by zbentley »

fragmede wrote: post #178
FireBeyond wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite is when you have Siri off but CarPlay on. You can be actively navigating, but say “find me the nearest X” and it’ll say “I’m sorry, I don’t know where you are”

Yeah there should just be a global option when you're settling up the phone called "I want my shit to work and don't care that Apple has my location", and then allow all the relevant apps location access, rather than the piecemeal per-apple-app setting. I mean, as a developer I can understand the difference between the weather app always having my location and apple maps only having my location when open, but what th…

Eeeh ... the gap between "full access for all apps" and "lockdown mode" is wide.

Casuals are in there--nontechnical folks for whom "brick breaker deluxe wants to access your contacts" might raise an eyebrow. The stalked are in there--malicious apps that track location of the install-ee are unfortunately not uncommon. The one-device-for-multiple-lives folks are in there (if your work email/contacts are on your phone, it's a good thing that your dating app has to ask permission before acquiring your phone's contacts). So are the forgetful--that periodic "hey, this app has had permissions for ages, do you still want it to have that access?" thing not only helps folks clean up their perms, it reminds lots of folks about services they forgot they paid (or worse, forgot they are still paying) for.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#219

Post by nixpulvis »

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…

Voice Assistance was a thing long before Siri, and was arguably more useful because it was less smart, the keywords worked more predictably.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#220

Post by w10-1 »

Underlying this seems to be a hard engineering problem: how to run a SaaS within UI timeframes that can store or ferry enough context to tailor for individual users, with privacy.

While Eddie Cue seems to be Apple's SaaS man, I can't say I'm confident that separating AI development and implementation is a good idea, or that Apple's implementation will not fall outside UI timeframes, given their other availability issues.

Unstated really is how good local models will be as an alternative to SaaS. That's been the gambit, and perhaps the prospective hardware-engineering CEO signals some breakthrough in the pipeline.

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