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John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

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Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#331

Post by nsbk »

gcanyon wrote: post #257

I know one feature Siri has added in the past fifteen years, because I always complained that Siri couldn't "text this photo to my wife." I would demonstrate to people that this doesn't work, complain about the lack of discoverability, and mention how with each new release of iOS I would try it again to confirm it still didn't work. Then one time, in a job interview of all things, (I'm a PM and was asked for an examp…

They definitely do change things and not always for the better. I used to start running/walking workouts from the Apple Watch telling Siri something along the lines of "let's get running!" or "let's go for a walk" to which it would react starting the right kind of workout. Since WatchOS 26 it tells me it doesn't know where I am and something about privacy settings, and that's it. Asking in robot mode it does work though: "start running workout"

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#332

Post by thatjoeoverthr »

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…

All of this is true. “Invitation to guess” is the key phrase in my comment. CLIs present as cryptic, which is a UX _advantage_ over chat wrappers because the implied call to action is “go do some reading before you touch this”.

An AI wrapper typically has few actual capabilities, concealed behind a skeuomorphic “fake person” UX. It may have a private list of capabilities but it otherwise doesn’t know if it knows something or not and will just say stuff.

It really needs to be 100% before it’s useful and not just frustrating.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#333

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#334

Post by lossyalgo »

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.

"Hunt the verb" can be alleviated to some degree for programs that require parameters by just showing the manpage when invalid or missing parameters are specified. It's highly frustrating when programs require you to go through every possible help parameter until you get lucky.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#335

Post by snowwrestler »

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…

Focusing on privacy was obviously the right strategic move for Apple. People complain about Siri, but they still buy iPhones in huge volumes. And a huge part of that is the belief that it’s safe to use iPhones for private things.

In terms of actually building a profitable business, no one seems to know how to make that work with AI right now. Leaks suggest OpenAI may turn to ads to monetize ChatGPT… which will raise all sorts of data questions. Privacy concerns might yet be an issue with AI chatbots.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#336

Post by swores »

astrange wrote: post #134
scrollaway wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asking “what’s the weather” in the morning gets Siri to yell at you about the phone being locked, or even “I don’t know where you are”. It’s such trash. Constant conditioning for garbage. Timers and alarm clocks it is.

Works for me. Turn on "allow Siri when locked"? If it doesn't know where you are then you might live in a Faraday cage.

Their point is that Siri is not consistent with these things. If you've never had these issues yourself then good for you, not everyone is as lucky.

I have had the same issues myself. The "allow Siri when locked" toggle for my phone is set to on, yet it still often refuses to do stuff like turning my home lights on/off, giving the reason that I need to unlock my phone.

And I've also had the location issue they gave an example of, where asking "what is the weather in Berlin" does not need it to know where you are because you've told it the location you're asking about, so the answer is the same regardless of whether you're asking while in Berlin or Tokyo, yet it still sometimes gets stuck believing it needs location access.

Edit: oops the issue of having said a location in the request wasn't in the comment you replied to, but another reply to it. But the overall point of Siri being annoyingly inconsistent still stands.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#337

Post by ksec »

As of now, 333 Comments so far and all of them are either on Siri or AI problems.

I thought there is a much deeper problem, this is yet another Tim Cook hiring that didn't work. In fact I am not aware of a single SVP grade report to Tim Cook that came from outside of Apple were successful.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#338

Post by swores »

zarzavat wrote: post #299
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Counter anecdote: I also have a British accent, and while I find Siri as shit as everyone else in this thread the dictation built into the iOS keyboard very rarely has a problem with my accent. I'm fairly close to Received Pronunciation, which I'd guess is one of the easier British accents for Siri to understand.

(I do often get frustrated with dictation quirks that don't have anything to do with my accent, like it choosing the obviously wrong option when their are multiple words that sound the same, especially its insistence on assuming I'm saying the name of a contact rather than the common noun that sounds the same.)

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#339

Post by bradly »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #265
bradly wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steve Jobs passed away the day after Siri’s release, and I don’t think anyone else had the confidence and internal credibility to push the hard organizational changes Siri needed, similar to when he moved Apple to a single P&L when he returned.

Until LLMs came along, there wasn’t much you could do to improve Siri’s underlying technology. You could throw a thousand monkeys at to add more phrases it could match on and improve the interface to let you know what you could do. But that’s about it.

LLMs would help a lot, but there was a lot of low hanging fruit. During my time at Apple I worked on some of the evaluation of Siri's quality and saw first hand how the org issues affected Siri's path forward.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#340

Post by swores »

eitland wrote: post #317
npunt wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My understanding is they are just stubborn. They once did it this way and now it is "the Apple way". Recent example: Apple used to hide "search in page" in the share menu in mobile safari. Far from obvious, but at some point one discovers it because there is no other place to look for it. Now they have finally decided to make a standard fly dropping overflow menu and hide the share button there. But interestingly you…

FYI, an easier way to search in pages in Safari is to just type what you want to search for in the address bar, and then at the bottom of the list of suggestions (you may need to scroll it down) you can tap "On this page".
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