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Apple Will Revamp Siri to Catch Up to Its Chatbot Competitors [using generative AI]
(www.nytimes.com)
About time. Siri is a useless dinosaur of an assistant.
this post was submitted on 11 May 2024
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Given what we've seen of the current trend of generative AI chatbots, it'll continue to be useless.
Yes but now it will be useless and make stuff up instead of just saying “Something went wrong” or “I don’t understand” to every request
I don’t agree. It can be leaps and bounds better. Won’t be amazing but if it’s essentially ChatGPT with a voice, it’ll be a huge upgrade.
Always has been.
Did Siri be good at any moment though?
I remember it sucked since its conception and in the most recent iOS versions too.
It always sucked tbh, but I think what the OP meant is that when it came out, it was understandable that it was very limited and not good, yet still innovative and interesting. Apple just never really improved it beyond that.
This makes sense, now that I think about it, there used to be a tweak that mimics Siri for devices that didn't support it, it was called Sara lol.
And yeah Siri was better but still Sara shipped some interesting ideas like keyboard support, like any ideas that Apple took from old tweaks.
Yeah always sucked
Siri was already behind the competition from its initial launch. I get the sneaking suspicion this will be an r1 with better ergonomics.
Siri was already behind the competition from its initial launch.
Apple Siri release date: October 4, 2011
Microsoft Cortana release date: April 2, 2014
Amazon Alexa release date: November 6, 2014
Google Assistant release date: May 18, 2016
Apple generally adopts technologies later than others so they could build on top of others learnings; things here was the exact opposite where they started years before others, and ended up paving the way to allow others to build better products based on their learnings.
Google Voice Actions for Android released in 2010, well before Siri did. Voice search as an in-browser function on the website in summer 2011, and even had a phone number for people to call in with Google queries by voice. From what I remember, Google's speech to text recognition was much, much better than Siri's at launch, and the gap only widened over time.
And then Google Now in 2012 was the version that started having fuzzy smart functionality, where it would link things together as an "assistant." The then-Google-owned Motorola released its Moto X in 2013 with an always-listening touchless trigger word for Google Now functionality.
huh, interesting... I don't remember it being released that far in advance. Makes sense in that case.
It's amazing how very far ahead siri was at the beginning, and how extremely far behind it became. It's a massive miss for Tim Cook's Apple
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Apple’s top software executives decided early last year that Siri, the company’s virtual assistant, needed a brain transplant.
The product’s use of generative artificial intelligence, which can write poetry, create computer code and answer complex questions, made Siri look antiquated, said two people familiar with the company’s work, who didn’t have permission to speak publicly.
technology threatens the company’s dominance of the global smartphone market because it has the potential to become the primary operating system, displacing the iPhone’s iOS software, said two people familiar with the thinking of Apple’s leadership, who didn’t have permission to speak publicly.
That sense of urgency contributed to Apple’s decision to cancel its other big bet — a $10 billion project to develop a self-driving car — and reassign hundreds of engineers to work on A.I.
Rather than compete directly with ChatGPT by releasing a chatbot that does things like write poetry, the three people familiar with its work said, Apple has focused on making Siri better at handling tasks that it already does, including setting timers, creating calendar appointments and adding items to a grocery list.
The assistant’s struggles blunted the appeal of the company’s HomePod smart speaker because it couldn’t consistently perform simple tasks like fulfilling a song request.
The original article contains 1,307 words, the summary contains 207 words. Saved 84%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I agree that it doesn’t do any homophone handling with music. It simply tries to make English words 95% of the time, and then search for them. I listen to niche music and it’s incredible frustrating - foreign bands, unique names, etc - all fucked. It’s the one thing I hate on my iPhone - how bad Siri still is, 13 years later.
Or when playing a station, ans saying "Siri, I dislike this song". Instead of disliking the song, it just restarts the station, and some times, it'll even play the dame damned song again.