Comment by eastbound
13 hours ago
> wait to understand what the thing is capable of doing
My parents use Android to ask “What are the 5 biggest towers in Chicago” or “Remove the people on my picture” while apparently iPhone is only capable of doing “Hey Siri start the Chronometer / There is no contact named Chronometer in your phone”.
My iPhone is lagging a ridiculous 10 years behind. It’s just that I don’t trust Google with my credit card.
These are software/cloud features. You can install gemini on iphone if you want to talk about towers in Chicago.
The only reason to care about it being OS integrated is to interact with functions of the OS, which siri does fine.
Apple's AI stuff also uses cloud features, though you can't use them on other platforms. The problem with Apple's new cloud features is that they generally just suck. I'm surprised iCloud works so well with how hard they're fumbling basic stuff like this.
At least all of the ones I have tried work locally. I’ve entered airplane mode and things like magic eraser in images works fine.
Siri does not do it fine, it's literally the example the above commenter showed.
Siri is one step below that for me, it still doesn't understand my accent, I feel like its voice recognition didn't improve from 2010...
"10 years behind" would be an improvement for Siri. It's actively broken much of the time in a way that Google Assistant or Alexa never has been.
I would argue that they are as bad as each other. I have to repeat most voice commands to Siri and Alexa than getting it right first time. No experience with Google.
Voice assistants were going to be this revolutionary new category. I think Amazon was going to populate a whole office tower in Boston with Alexa engineers at one point. There have been incremental improvements here and there but, to a first approximation, none of it has really worked out.
I want the reverse version of this, if Apple can promise me to 'lag behind' for another ten years I'll buy my first Apple device in ten years