Comment by RobMurray
18 hours ago
I know plenty of blind people who have their voice speed unbearably slow and barely scratch the surface of what technology can do for them. I think an interface where you can tell your phone what to do in natural language will really help a lot of less technical people.
I'm not getting my hopes up though given apple's history with Siri, which is truly awful.
Apple's history with accessibility is, on the whole, pretty good. I strongly suspect that the "coming soon" part of this means "after we integrate Google Gemini models into the system," so I don't think you should use the current state of Siri as a yardstick. (I actually have decent luck with the current Siri, but I don't push it very much and have sort of adapted myself to its limitations; on the flip side, I have a lot of skepticism around LLMs, but they're really a quantum leap in natural language processing capability over what came before, and the use cases they're showing here seem to be right in the LLM wheelhouse -- with the asterisk of "you're still always going to have to check its work.")
> I strongly suspect that the "coming soon" part of this means "after we integrate Google Gemini models into the system…"
I don’t think the Google's tech has anything to do with these features.
This would had to have been in the works long before the Google announcement. Also, these are enhancements of existing iOS and macOS features. They don’t require an LLM anyway; these features use Apple’s Machine Learning models.
For example, creating subtitles for videos? iOS 16 introduced Live Captions for FaceTime calls in 2022 [1].
[1]: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/05/apple-previews-innova...
Coming soon very likely means iOS 27.
This has been the typical pattern for Apple for the last few years. The flashy features are announced at WWDC, accessibility has a dedicated, earlier press release. Before this practice, accessibility announcements would usually be tucked in some WWDC slide that most people wouldn't even notice.
> accessibility has a dedicated, earlier press release
IIRC, it's timed to land around Global Accessibility Awareness Day (May 21).
https://accessibility.day/
The thing that disappointed me about this amazing announcement was “coming later this year“. They should probably give us dates for a little while at least until we get the (<)$95 checks.
I just would not wanna promise anything. Except “available for download this Friday“ once the gold master is passing tests.
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Being able-bodied and sighted is probably the biggest disadvantage for using iOS.
Twenty years and text input & manipulation on iPhone sucks a big fat hair pair of dogs balls still.
The last time I daily drove Android was over two years ago and it was immeasurably less God-damn-I-wanna-dig-Jobs-corpse-up-n-give-the-guy-a-piece-of-my-mind, only problem is his grave is unmarked. Arsehole!
Whenever my sister (blind) and I (visually impaired) visit my mom (blind) we secretly turn up the reading speed on her TV just a little because we can't stand how unbearably slow she keeps it, but if we turn it up quickly, she'll freak out.
After a few more years of Thanksgivings and Christmases and Mothers' Days, we'll finally train her up to a reasonable speed lmao.
This is heartwarming. The audio equivalent to the practice of sighted people fixing the bad default settings on boomers’ televisions each Thanksgiving.