Comment by quitit
3 days ago
This is a bit of a layer cake:
1. The first issue is that there is significant momentum in calling Siri bad, so even if Apple released a higher quality version it will still be labelled bad. It can enhance the user's life and make their device easier to use, but the overall press will be cherrypicked examples where it did something silly.
2. Basing Siri on Google's Gemini can help to alleviate some of that bad press, since a non-zero share of that doomer commentary comes from brand-loyalists and astroturfing.
3. The final issue is that on-device Siri will never perform like server-based ChatGPT. So in a way it's already going to disappoint some users who don't realise that running something on mobile device hardware is going to have compromises which aren't present on a server farm. To help illustrate that point: We even have the likes of John Gruber making stony-faced comparisons between Apple's on-device image generator toy (one that produces about an image per second) versus OpenAI's server farm-based image generator which makes a single image in about 1-2 minutes. So if a long-running tech blogger can't find charity in those technical limitations, I don't expect users to.
Siri is objectively bad though. It isn't some vendetta. I am disabled and there are at least 50 different things that I'd love siri to do that should be dead simple, yet it cannot. My favorite one was when I suffered a small but not serious fall, decided to test whether siri could be alerted to call 9-11 while being less than 6 feet away from me, absolutely could not understand let alone execute my request. It's a lot of stuff like this. Its core functionality often just does not work.
> The final issue is that on-device Siri will never perform like server-based ChatGPT. So in a way it's already going to disappoint some users who don't realise that running something on mobile device hardware is going to have compromises which aren't present on a server farm.
For many years, siri requests were sent to an external server. It still sucked.
I don't think the parent said that Siri wasn't bad, on the contrary it sounds like they agree.
Their point is that if Apple totally scraps the current, bad, product called "Siri" and replaces it with an entirely different, much better product that is also named "Siri" but shares nothing but the name, people's perceptions of the current bad Siri will taint their impressions of the new one.
It's pretty clear they tried their best to miss or reinterpret the points I made so they could talk about something else.
3 replies →
> Hey Siri, call me an ambulance!
> Alright, from now on I will call you Anne Ambulance.
I'd be skeptical about even new LLM siri being able to dial 911.
These models tend to have a "mind of their own", and I can totally, absolutely, see a current SOTA LLM convincing itself it needs to call 911 because you asked it how to disinfect a cut.
Ideally you have a layer before the LLM that filters out stuff the phone can do without an LLM. The LLM probably shouldn't even have the power to call 911, that should be a layer lower. And probably you don't want to send simple queries like "call XYZ" to the cloud, best to just do it locally.
In the 15 years since I've been an Apple user, Siri has never worked for me when I really needed it.
There are many people who lament that Siri sucks but would be happy to admit if/when this changes. Even if it goes from super shitty (as evidenced by randomly calling people I have never called/texted when I ask it to call my wife) to "pretty good" I will be the first to admit that it is better. I look forward to it getting better and being able to use it more often.
re 3: I doubt Google is going to hand over the weights to Apple to put on device.
They wouldn’t fit.
Not with that attitude.
Apple and Google have said that Private Cloud Compute will be involved as well, which Apple is trying to build a mystique of "on-device-like" trust. (Which yes, if Private Cloud Compute is involved and is secure in the ways that Apple says it is does presumably imply that the announced deal with Google includes selling Apple the complete model weights.)
Nor was such a thing implied. The information in the various news articles about it also don't make that claim.