Comment by hnlmorg
2 days ago
I do wish Siri was a little more intelligent to be honest.
I use Siri when I need a fast, distraction-free, action. Which makes it perfect when driving or performing other tasks where my hands a busy and/or I cannot put my attention on my phones LCD screen.
The way Apple paired with ChatGPT is awkward. You get prompted if you want to use Siri or ChatGPT. Which creates a distraction.
I'd love it if Siri was smart enough to differentiate between:
- an automation request. eg setting an alarm or ringing a contact. The kind of interaction what you wouldn't want to offload to a 3rd party but is the kind of interaction where you don't need vast datastores of training.
- and an open-ended question. eg What time are Oasis playing in London tonight? Who was the 23rd President of Germany? What are the rules of Dodgeball? these sort of things are less confidential and don't require handing control of your phone to a 3rd party.
And I'd love it if Siri automatically offloaded from their local AI to ChatGPT (or whatever) when the latter was identified. That should be opt in, but when opted in, it should be automatic. I shouldn't have to consent each time after I've opted in.
> The way Apple paired with ChatGPT is awkward. You get prompted if you want to use Siri or ChatGPT. Which creates a distraction.
My hunch tells me this is a temporary stopgap until Apple figures out their "private cloud compute" or whatever where they can run their own model, after that it'll be seamless. Try to do as much on device as possible, and if that fails/is not possible, offload to the model running on Apple's servers rather than a 3rd party service.
Maybe they're "behind" (although, this tech is still so early I don't think anyone is truly behind), but I appreciate their approach to try and do as much on device as possible. They are the only ones around that aren't just defaulting to "harvest as much data as possible and ship it to our servers."
I can be patient - Siri works fine for what I want it for anyway - it can set reminders, timers, alarms, dictate messages, and create notes. That's about all I use it for and would use it for. Anything else I'm not going to ask my phone, I'm going to take it out and head to Google.
> Anything else I'm not going to ask my phone, I'm going to take it out and head to Google.
But my while point was there’s a plethora of different reasons why “heading to Google” isn’t always practical. Like when you’re driving. When you’re cooking. Even when you’re just playing with the kids, a question gets asked, and you don’t want to spoil the momentum of the play by staining at an LCD screen for 2 minutes.
Siri really damn convenient for those occasions when you want an action performed but don’t want the distraction of performing that action.
In fact, I’d go further and say that’s the biggest selling point for current gen consumer AI.
> Maybe they're "behind" (although, this tech is still so early I don't think anyone is truly behind)
The tech is still early but Siri are most definitely behind.
It’s not even remotely close to the capabilities of even open source models, let alone the commercial ones.
And the fact that they had to bolt on ChatGPT in such an ad hoc way speaks volumes about how Apple realise themselves just how far behind Siri has gotten.
I think you’re right that it’s not their long term plan. But that doesn’t change that it presently feels like a very ugly kludge.
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