Comment by al_borland
5 days ago
You asked 2 questions in a system made for 1 question at a time. Split these up and Siri answers them fine. You’re holding it wrong.
5 days ago
You asked 2 questions in a system made for 1 question at a time. Split these up and Siri answers them fine. You’re holding it wrong.
A tool that can handle more than one question at a time is useful. Modern LLMs handle that with ease. So it's completely reasonable to be critical of that limitation.
Sure, what’s not reasonable is expecting Siri to be a modern LLM, when they know it’s not. They asked a question they knew Siri couldn’t handle just to slam it. I’m not critical of a 5-function calculator for not one-shotting complex equations like a computer.
While Siri only does one thing at a time, I trust the answer more, because it’s doing the actual math and not just guessing what the most likely answer is, like an LLM. We need to pick the right tool for the right job. Frankly, I don’t think an LLM is the right tool for conversations like this, and jumbling multiple questions into a single question is something people do with LLMs to get more use out of them during the day, this is an adaptation to a limitation of the free tier (and sometimes speed) of the LLM.
On Android phone, the equivalent voice assistant (Gemini) handles the question gracefully. Regardless of what you think about Google, having a single-button LLM-powered voice assistant, deeply integrated into the phone's OS, is a very useful feature, and Apple is quite far away from developing a competing version of this. They'll have to buy it or go without.
It’s not unreasonable
Amazon already reworked Alexa to be backed by a LLM months ago, and they were delayed doing it.
You’re telling me that Apple isn’t capable of the same to Siri?
1 reply →
Why is Siri being discussed in the context of LLMs and Apple Intelligence? Have they already released Siri 2.0 or am I missing something?
The OP is making a point that Apple is behind. They might be publishing research, but it’s completely useless to the end user buying their products.
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Never mind that Infocom games running on my Apple ][+ could handle that sort of command in 1983.
(Well, with multiple direct objects, anyway.)
"holding it wrong" was exactly the right phrase given how that phrase was used with the iPhone antenna bridging problem. This is an Apple product failing.
"You haven't contorted your comically simple query enough to make the brittle tool work. Throw the chicken bones better next time."
It’s been this way for over a decade. If someone hasn’t figured it out by now, that’s kind of on them.
I’m not even sure why those two things would be asked as a single question. It seems like a very unnatural way to pose those two questions. Most humans would trip on that, especially if it was asked verbally.
> It seems like a very unnatural way to pose those two questions. Most humans would trip on that
I'd assume GP only gave an example. As a pretty frequent user, I can unfortunately only confirm that Siri trips over almost every multi-part question.
This would be forgivable if there weren't multiple voice-based AI consumer products available that can handle these kinds of requests perfectly.
2 replies →
OP isn't asking how to use Siri to do his contrived task. OP is saying that Siri in 2025 should be able to handle that relatively simple albeit contrived task.