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John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

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Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#291

Post by isodev »

khazhoux wrote: post #238
isodev wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Examples for what? Name one feature that isn’t performative privacy to look good in press releases? - it’s probably opt in, Apple somehow excludes themselves from the list of baddies, can’t be audited, there are different ways to get the data, etc.

Remember they even had an ad campaign “what happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone” which is technically incorrect and “smarter Siri” can’t exist around such promises atm.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#292

Post by nneonneo »

dhussoe wrote: post #195
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…

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.

Siri does have documentation: https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/iphone/ipha48873ed6/io.... This list (recursively) contains more things than probably 95% of users ever do with Siri. The problem really boils down to the fact that a CLI is imposing enough that someone will need a manual (or a teacher), whereas a natural language interface looks like it should support "basically any query" but in practice does not (and cannot) due to fundamental limitations. Those limitations are not obvious, especially to lay users, making it impossible in practice to know what can and cannot be done.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#293

Post by NaomiLehman »

drewg123 wrote: post #181

Siri is almost comically bad. Just one recent anecdote: When discussing a Jeopardy answer with my wife, I say "Hey Siri, who was Pol Pot". Siri said, "OK, calling Scott". So it woke up my friend at 1am.. And if I hear another "I found this on the web", I'm going to scream. Siri is so bad it makes me want to go back to a pixel.

hey war criminal talk is reserved for before midnight only!

"here are some pictures of pot pot"

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#294

Post by dyauspitr »

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…

Strong disagree. I would say 90% of the text I “write” on my phone is speech to text. I wouldn’t use ChatGPT nearly as much if I had to type out paragraph prompts every single time.

Maybe it’s just my imagination, but it seems like text to speech in the ChatGPT prompt window uses the context around it in the paragraph to fix what I’m saying so it is inordinately accurate compared to the rest of the iOS system.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#295

Post by dyauspitr »

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…

Again, I disagree. I almost entirely use Siri to get directions to places using Google maps with my voice when I’m on CarPlay. I also use Siri to respond to texts in my car, not as frequently but often enough.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#296

Post by apparent »

drewg123 wrote: post #181

Siri is almost comically bad. Just one recent anecdote: When discussing a Jeopardy answer with my wife, I say "Hey Siri, who was Pol Pot". Siri said, "OK, calling Scott". So it woke up my friend at 1am.. And if I hear another "I found this on the web", I'm going to scream. Siri is so bad it makes me want to go back to a pixel.

There was a time when Siri would confirm before making a phone call. But now it will call anyone, including people I've literally never called (and rarely text), without confirmation. This seems like a bad outcome that is very easy to fix.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#297

Post by davedx »

drewg123 wrote: post #181

Siri is almost comically bad. Just one recent anecdote: When discussing a Jeopardy answer with my wife, I say "Hey Siri, who was Pol Pot". Siri said, "OK, calling Scott". So it woke up my friend at 1am.. And if I hear another "I found this on the web", I'm going to scream. Siri is so bad it makes me want to go back to a pixel.

Yeah this is one reason I've ordered a OnePlus as my next phone.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#298

Post by dyauspitr »

gdiamos wrote: post #201
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.

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.

macOS, iPadOS and watchOS are all still the best at what they do.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#299

Post by zarzavat »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #267
drewg123 wrote: post #181

Siri is almost comically bad. Just one recent anecdote: When discussing a Jeopardy answer with my wife, I say "Hey Siri, who was Pol Pot". Siri said, "OK, calling Scott". So it woke up my friend at 1am.. And if I hear another "I found this on the web", I'm going to scream. Siri is so bad it makes me want to go back to a pixel.

We need to separate three separate issues. I work with call centers and I always need to discuss all three 1. Voice to text transcriptions 2. Text to understanding 3. Adding capabilities where it can do something with #2. The voice to text that Siri uses seems to be worse than when you are dictating using voice to text from the keyboard. The latter gets close to 100% with my southern native English accent and does ok…

I have a British accent and the speech-to-text from the keyboard is also terrible.

Honestly with these assistants I'd rather just type my query. Voice input is embarrassing and error-prone. The only place that voice input is useful is in the kitchen.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#300

Post by dyauspitr »

PopePompus wrote: post #170
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?

The current situation on Google's Android Pixel phones is odd. The old non-LLM Google Assistant works well in a limited domain: Things like setting alarms, phoning by name, etc. It's similar in scope to Siri, but with better voice recognition, and better context awareness. However, Google is desperate to kill Google Assistant and force all Pixel users to use Gemini instead. Gemini 3 is a very good LLM, and far, far,…

They should have deterministic actions for certain non fungibles and let the LLM do the rest.
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