Comment by Prosammer
1 year ago
I'm a big fan of LLMs generally, but does anyone even want incoming texts summarized like this? Like even if they were accurate summaries, seeing "Wife expresses frustration with her husband's messiness" is a lot less fun than "Clean up your clothes, dipshit".
It’s probably my favorite of the AI features on Apple devices now.
My wife and I both have a habit of sending multiple small messages rather than a large one. Probably because we both used IRC extensively on the past and grew up on length-limited SMSes. The summaries are very very handy at letting me glance at my notification's and see if anything in her last x messages needs a reply now or whether it’s just “chat”.
I’ve found LLM summaries of stuff in general to be one of the handiest uses of it personally.
No offense to you personally, but what kind of life does one live where one needs to glance at their partners' texts to shave off those ten precious seconds.
I feel the same way - summarizing unnecessarily long email chains or slack threads at work? Works for me. Summarizing messages from my friends and loved ones? Feels dehumanizing.
My wife loves to carpet bomb messages and the summary is often useful to glance at to see how important they are. But the inaccuracy prevents it from being useful and I'll often open the entire stream of thought even though I don't have time between meetings.
That sounds like AI is a band-aid for Apple's self-inflicted problem caused by designing notifications as a dumb list of boxes limited to a couple of lines.
They could have merged the last few recent short messages into one bigger notification, instead of making the notification for the very last message cover the rest.
> I don’t have time between meetings
[guillotine raises]
I turned these summaries off, but then turned them back on because I find them humorous.
A bit notable: the AI summarization of spam texts makes them seem much more credible.
There is no 'ironic user only' option in the analytics.
There probably should be.
The entertainment value for me is in seeing these features turned in by Apple/Meta/Google and then working backwards to the real use cases they must be seeing. They simply wouldn’t do it if people didn’t want it, hence lots of people want it. You’re all weirdos.
It's red meat for the shareholder class and nothing more. It's opt-out by default so on the next earnings call they can brag about the "stunning levels of user adoption".
It's useful for multiple texts. Single ones not so much.
I find the whole summarization use case completely misses the mark. If a message is from someone I want to hear from, just give it to me verbatim. Otherwise, give me tools to delay/down-prioritize/ignore their messages.
I get the sense that making group chats silent by default would have a more useful impact on notification overload than AI summaries.
I also find it useful for group texts when a long conversation happens. Easier to get an idea when I don’t care to join in. Another use case for me is image descriptions, particularly in carplay.
I don't want any incoming texts at all if they are trivial complaints that can wait until we see each other in person and can actually have a conversation. Now if the AI could judge "this isn't an emergency" and just present the messages at the end of the day, or at least when I'm not otherwise busy, that might be something.
Summarization model is crap, so it needs to be used for crap. Like Trump news, or latest office slack drama. I want the messages from my loved ones unabridged. Right now, Apple is unable to discern these use cases.