Comment by atonse

It's not about being fancy. My examples are so utterly dull.

Being able to say "turn on the lights in the living room and turn off the fans in the kids' rooms" – is not a crazy use case.

Instead, I literally have to say:

- Turn on Living Room light

- wait

- turn off <son's name> bedroom fan

- wait

- turn off <daughter's name> bedroom fan

Yes, I could actually say "turn off all the fans" (I believe Siri understands that) but that's usually not what I want.

Another example, you have 3-4 timers going: Let's say I'm cooking and have an oven timer, but also have a timer for my kids to stop their device time. I may have a few going. But being able to say "cancel all the timers except the longest one" is TRIVIAL for a first year programmer to implement. But instead, it's a slog with Siri.

There is a consequence to shifting to LLMs. Despite Siri's reputation, it is a well used product(1), and despite HN's constant noise, Siri actually works very well for the purposes of controlling other apple devices in ways that I've noticed to be far better than Alexa (the other digital assistant that I regularly use).

Switching that to an LLM-based represents a massive increase in computational requirements without pushing the needle for most requests. While fancy, users don't want to sit and have a verbose ChatGPT style conversation with Siri, they just want the command run and done. So this means any advertised change to Siri will need to be sufficiently large such that Siri could seemingly decode any request with minimal or no follow-up questioning, anything short of this will be largely derided, and face the same backlash as current-era Siri.

At the moment siri answers many trivial requests without the use of an LLM. Yes you can speak to siri with relative terms or needs based requests, e.g. saying "It's dark in here" will result in siri turning on the lights in just the room where the request was made(2), even if other receivers in the house heard the request. It's also smart enough to recognise that if you label a room as something like the "office" but later made a request for the "study", it will prompt if actually meant the "office".

The big caveat here is that Siri's abilities change based on the language selected, non-english languages appear to have less flexibility in the type of request and the syntax used. Another factor is that requests during certain peak periods appear to be handled differently, as if there are fall-back levels of AI smarts at the server level. To get around that new Siri will need to be largely offline, which appears consistent with Apple's new AI strategy of local models for basic tasks and complex requests being sent to private cloud compute.

Like Apple Maps, I anticipate the pile-on to Siri will go on far longer than deserved, but what does seem certain is that change is coming.

(1) Apple have stated that Siri is the most used digital assistant. However I have not found any supporting data for this claim other than Apple's own keynote address where the claim was made.

(2) Requires that rooms are set up in homekit and there are per-room based receivers, such as a homepod in each room.

This approach would be fine if users were empowered to add AI integration they wanted on their own.

They are not though. Absolute control over the platform means Apple has the responsibility to have more vision for the future than anyone else. They do not and will fail to satisfy their users. It will result in either a dramatic change of leadership and strategy and or drive the customers elsewhere.

> Siri, open the east door

< do you want to open - the east door - the west door - all the doors

> Siri, open the east door < opening the east door

They kinda really super suck. Siri used to work better than it does today. It's often a bigger chore than opening the app and tapping the button.

These quirks hit me on a daily basis when all I want to do is control my lights and locks

Obviously reasonable minds may disagree. And i do i disagree with your disagree-al. Your reasonable response necessarily stems from a foundation that llms are just stochastic parrots incapable of non-trivially changing someone's usage. That isn't true, and has been shown to be untrue in many domains at this point. And that's only from the chatbot form of llms. Tool usage and agents will reveal more new paradigms

If OpenAI released a phone Apple’s sales will be down 50%.

At this point only a handful of apps that are irreplaceable are propping iOS up and that won’t last.

I would. Hands free in the car or when mowing the grass, chatting with the AI would be huge.

"Text my wife and say I'll be late." is still too much to ask: it responds with 20 questions about all the parameters.

"turn up the volume" does actually work for the first time, lately. (Bravo, Android).

"open app antenna pod and begin playing" is way out of the question. Suck.

Young people are increasingly comfortable using voice, and marketing agencies already consider Gen Alpha to be “voice native.” I once saw a small child help his grandfather with a phone issue. The grandfather fumbled with the GUI, but the child opened Siri and solved it by voice. If Apple drops the ball on voice, it may not hurt them today - but they risk losing the next decade.

I use Siri a lot for home automation, and am frustrated by how much better it could be.

"Turn off all the lights in the house" works, but "turn off all the lights" does not. What?!??

I do think Apple needs a better Siri, but I think ultimately they were smart not to plow tons of money into it trying to do it themselves.

A better Siri is an expense to keep up the premium brand, not something that they will monetize. For particular uses of AI people will just want particular apps.