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John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

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Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#351

Post by ianferrel »

ianferrel wrote: post #71
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…

Honestly, my experience with Siri is that it works worse than it did 10 years ago. It's not clear to me if that's with Siri itself or just the general decrease in quality of Apple software over the past N years, but zero changes would have been an improvement. Things that seemed to work reliably for me 10 years ago but now do not: 1. "Call mom". Siri has apparently forgotten who my mother is. I tried "Hey Siri is my…

I remembered a third one:

3. It won't reliably play music anymore! I have a good set of songs in my iPhone's Apple Music library. When I say "Hey siri, play ", it asks me for access to Pandora (which I do have on my phone). I don't want to play it on Pandora. I have the song! I have just spent the last 10 minutes trying to figure out how to change this, and neither the youtube video I found searching nor this reddit thread (https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/y18ioq/changing_the_de...) seems to work.

Amusingly (?) the reddit people have the opposite problem. They want to use a 3rd party music app but can't get their phones to stop preferring Apple-provided apps.

I can sometimes get this to work by saying "Play on Apple Music", but even that is not reliable.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#352

Post by bigyabai »

the_mar wrote: post #229
singularity2001 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We'd have working voice assistants if it wasn't for Apple Monopoly banning all apps that are "competition to Siri" and "asking for too many permissions" because sandbox is not compatible with system integration.

look if you don't care about privacy, just buy a google phone

If Apple can't offer competitive APIs that maintain privacy, then I don't trust them to handle my data in the first place.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#353

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

astafrig wrote: post #160
xvector wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are solving for privacy before solving for the UX. They should actually make something useful first, and then work backwards to making it private before releasing it.

Making privacy some end-goal that PMs cut to meet targets is how you end up with Google redefining privacy to mean "only we have access to every aspect of your life, now and in the future". If Apple takes the position that the UX has to fit in around the privacy requirements, so what? Privacy is a core pillar of their product identity—a built-in hallucinating compliments machine isn't.

To be fair, Google have always treated privacy that way, long before they used any of that data.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#355

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

bradly wrote: post #345
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now I’m curious. What could have been improved about Siri other than “bringing in 1000 monkeys” to add more phrases for intent matching before LLMs?

Good question. While I had a fairly narrow view of a very large system, I'll give my personal perspective. I worked on systems for evaluating the quality of models over time and for evaluating the quality of new models before release to understand how the new models would perform compared to current models once in the wild. It was difficult to get Siri to use these tools that were outside of their org. While this wou…

Despite my positive experience between building systems based on intent recognition and how much better LLMs are than “1000 monkeys”, it seems like the two examples we have of LLM backed assistants - Google and Amazon - that it made them worse from reports.

I don’t know why that is from a technical level.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#356

Post by TYPE_FASTER »

matt-attack wrote: post #251
TYPE_FASTER wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t know for years that you can ask it to do things remotely over SSH.

Can you explain?

You can run shortcuts using Siri. You can create a shortcut with an action that executes via SSH: https://matsbauer.medium.com/how-to-run-ssh-terminal-command....

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#357

Post by bombcar »

antipaul wrote: post #347
bombcar wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just want "set timer for 5 minutes" and "what time is it" to work reliably, 100% of the time.

Works on Siri! You can even set – get this – multiple timers ;)

I seem to get about 90%; wife gets closer to 80%. I just want it to be better.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#358

Post by NaOH »

bombcar wrote: post #357
antipaul wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Works on Siri! You can even set – get this – multiple timers ;)

I seem to get about 90%; wife gets closer to 80%. I just want it to be better.

Activate Siri and then say the amount of time you'd like on the timer. For me, that's holding the side button then only saying, "20 minutes."

The one caveat is that once the timer you want is two and a half hours or longer, then Siri replies by asking what you would like to convert to.

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#359

Post by bombcar »

NaOH wrote: post #358
bombcar wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seem to get about 90%; wife gets closer to 80%. I just want it to be better.

Activate Siri and then say the amount of time you'd like on the timer. For me, that's holding the side button then only saying, "20 minutes." The one caveat is that once the timer you want is two and a half hours or longer, then Siri replies by asking what you would like to convert to.

That may be it - we’re always asking a HomePod to do it - “hey siri set timer for five minutes”

Re: John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

#360

Post by __patchbit__ »

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…

Apple never wargamed the Siri dialogue tree for iPhone `lost and found' recovery safely return to owner the one time first time I tried to use it seriously.
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