Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 380 posts

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#231

Post by dpark »

gbriel wrote: post #136
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.

Everyone is struggling to create AI tools. And just because you don't approve of how they spend time to make their UI look "fancy", doesn't really mean much. You are not a normal user/customer.

This sounds like you take slights toward Apple weirdly personally.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#232

Post by bane »

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…

It also pioneered billions of other users with "hey google" and "siri" uselessness which also copied and then completely flatlined with things to do beyond calling the wrong person in your call list, setting timers, and playing the wrong song.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#233

Post by bane »

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.

A lot of AI models also suffer this flaw.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#234

Post by threatofrain »

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.

Siri could've done better but Apple is definitely taking big risks with their privacy play. They might just corner themselves.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#235

Post by bane »

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…

Or if these chat apps could hold a conversation as basic as "I don't know where you are, would you allow me access to your gps?"

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#236

Post by hu3 »

LZ_Khan wrote: post #16
sfblah wrote: post #11

Siri's awfulness really is a thing to behold. I haven't used an android phone in a while. For those users out there, does its voice assistant actually work?

No. actually no company on earth has solved the voice assistant thing yet

I guess it depends on what you mean by voice assistant.

But Android has been 100% accurate for simple commands for over a decade for me. Things like:

- "weather." tells me forecast of where I am.

- "alarm at 8am" and "alarm in 30 minutes" works as expected.

- calendar commands also work

My favourite is "go home" which opens Google map with a route to home.

These things just work. I don't recall last time I had to repeat myself.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#237

Post by labrador »

dpark wrote: post #230
labrador wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don’t remember Windows 8 being particularly transparent. Windows 8 is remembered for the start screen with the modern tiles.

Right, I was thinking of Windows Vista before it

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#238

Post by khazhoux »

isodev wrote: post #135
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…

> Apple focused so much on privacy Apple also doesn't have actual privacy since their focus was using the word strategically against their competitors, not actually protecting user data. > Subramanya, who Apple describes as a "renowned AI researcher," spent 16 years at Google, where he was head of engineering for Gemini. He left Google earlier this year for Microsoft. In a press release, Apple said that Subramanya wi…

> Apple also doesn't have actual privacy since their focus was using the word strategically against their competitors, not actually protecting user data.

big company bad, or do you have examples?

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#239

Post by browningstreet »

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…

Siri isn’t the only one.. Amazon has the same story with Alexa, but they did get to Alexa+ before Siri’s successor bowed.
Post reply on HN