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Apple Engineers Reportedly Working on ChatGPT-Like AI Despite Siri Design Flaws
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I only use Siri to ask about weather, set timers while cooking, and occasionally to dictate typing. The timers are perfect. Weather is responsive. Dictation is always TERRIBLE. After using it on a website, the keyboard often becomes unresponsive so I can't fix the inevitable errors. I have to close the page. At that point I pick up my pixel.
I don't ask it anything remotely complex anymore. I got tired of seeing web search results instead of getting an answer.
I don't ask it anything remotely complex anymore. I got tired of seeing web search results instead of getting an answer.
The biggest issue I have had with Siri since day one, is my input cannot be cumulative. Each input is a separate query or interaction. For example:
I once asked Siri for the "Nearest Target." It gave me archery retailers.
I said "Where is the nearest Target store?" It gave me the same archery stores.
I then said "Nearest Target Supercenter?" Again, it gave me the same archery stores.
I tried, "Not archery, Target retail store". Same results.
"Retail stores titled Target". Same results.
I used Google Maps, pulled in the parking of a Target store and tried again "Where is the nearest Target retail store?" It gave the same results.
Siri needs to allow for follow up or modifier inputs to the original query in order to refine results. The only times I now use Siri is while driving when I say "Text my wife." and even then it's 50/50 between Siri and just touching the screen.
I once asked Siri for the "Nearest Target." It gave me archery retailers.
I said "Where is the nearest Target store?" It gave me the same archery stores.
I then said "Nearest Target Supercenter?" Again, it gave me the same archery stores.
I tried, "Not archery, Target retail store". Same results.
"Retail stores titled Target". Same results.
I used Google Maps, pulled in the parking of a Target store and tried again "Where is the nearest Target retail store?" It gave the same results.
Siri needs to allow for follow up or modifier inputs to the original query in order to refine results. The only times I now use Siri is while driving when I say "Text my wife." and even then it's 50/50 between Siri and just touching the screen.
I asked Siri yesterday when the next season of Ted Lasso comes out. My phone gave the release date of season 2. My HomePod gave “summer 2022”, which was the estimated release back in 2021.
Alexa nailed it on the first try, for an Apple TV original.
Point is, the only way to go is up.
Alexa nailed it on the first try, for an Apple TV original.
Point is, the only way to go is up.
If Siri actually did any real work, I wouldn't be asking Alexa questions. Seems like whenever I ask Siri about something, she makes ME look it up in wikipedia. Alexa, on the other hand, will give you an answer. It may not be as deep or thorough an answer but it will be an answer. Siri is like an obnoxious internet troll who says "You're standing on the shoulders of giants and I'm not going to do your work for you."
Weirdest headline ever. They are improving Siri "despite" it being bad?
There is no revenue potential with Siri so I seriously doubt it'll get rewritten.
Well, we could, but then CarPlay is completely disabled, and a few other things I recall.... Apple pushes you to have it enabled pretty hard.
It's annoying to do it each time I setup device. And Apple is hell-bent on shoving it down user throat at every corner. And it's utterly useless..
I actually find the dictation pretty good and even with technical terms from my field. I don’t dictate on webpages but on documents. I would put it close to dragon if you speak carefully like you are dictating.
Siri began to gets its knowledge by working with Wolfram which was clever but ultimately a bad turn. It makes for some occasionally brilliant results and even tables but it cannot keep up with the internet and the level of research Google puts into answering questions. They need to break that and build their own search engine back end at this point. That’s going to be alot of work
How often are you setting up a new device? And how is that any different from the “first run” setup process of the others? You still have to deal with first time prompts when setting up any device of any platform?
I find the first run experience to be annoying too, but it’s far from “shoving down your throat”?
Siri:
Well I've been waiting for this moment for all my life, oh lord
I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh lord
AppleGPTChat123ABC:
But I know the reason why you keep this silence up
No you don't fool me
The hurt doesn't show, but the pain still grows.
Well I've been waiting for this moment for all my life, oh lord
I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh lord
AppleGPTChat123ABC:
But I know the reason why you keep this silence up
No you don't fool me
The hurt doesn't show, but the pain still grows.
This.
Apple is prideful in that it wants to proclaim that it makes all of its own software (whilst hiding that it uses cloud storage and compute power from its tech titan rivals), but totally agree.
1. Licence ChatGPT at virtually any price.
Because Chat GPT is obviously a game changing technology and if Apple doesn't have an answer for Chat GPT-4 by next year (at the very latest) it's in trouble.
All of this swiping and pressing is going to go away when we start to have our own personal EA's who sort our lives out for us.
And I don't have any faith that Apple has anything close to Chat GPT-4 up its sleeves. AI/ML at Apple is obviously to do around photography and video imagery - and presumably all aligned around work to do with its upcoming VR/AVR product.
2. Start a priority red project to integrate chatGTP. Use a private instance for Apple etc. so users know that it's privacy preserving as you say.
3. Create a robust set of guardrails and limits.
This will deliberately limit Chat GPT. However, Apple just needs to have its existing product vision for Siri, but for it to actually be useful and work.
4. Integrate it into the existing Siri voice recognition and speech generation systems.
5. Then start to work out a way for it to know about who you are from the data on your phone and iCloud and have it remember interactions i.e. a persistent memory.
From what I've experienced of Chat GPT-4, I can't see why this wouldn't be possible. A persistent memory for your interactions with Chat-GPT would obviously cost a fortune in storage, so I suspect that's the only reason why we're not seeing it in Chat-GPT right now.
For all of his faults, I think that Apple is now really starting to miss Steve Jobs.
There needs to be someone ('someone' could be a group of people) with a super product focussed mind-set who is driving product change throughout Apple's products.
I think that under Cook, there has grown too much a numbers/efficiency/operations mindset and I think that that explains why certain products and software don't see many changes. The numbers just don't add up to justify any time being spent on them etc. etc.
I don't want to write another 'What would Steve do?' post, but I think that he took pride in everything that Apple put out and was always driving change forward (even if sometimes his taste was questionable i.e. brushed metal UI).
You just don't get that feeling from Apple anymore.
This really drives home how bad Siri is. And how fixing it seems Herculean. And how they may be working on it but how it seems to rank as a priority. Seriously.
Ps has anybody else with AirPods 2 noticed that Siri isn’t as responsive as she was on AirPods 1? (Sometimes I think Siri got her own noise cancellation upgrade … from MY voice!)
This is a great example of how the industry is led by profit and not by innovation. Siri went from promising to good enough to mediocre to embarrassing and as long as this was not a market share factor they didn't care despite having unlimited resources to improve it. I am positive this would not have happened with Steve Jobs around. Now they are jumping on the panic wagon along with Google. I hope they stop with their metaverse glasses nonsense and focus on where they money is at. Windows will soon be an AI based OS while macOS will still be struggling to figure out windows management.
Steve Jobs made his views on user privacy very clear.
That vision is why Siri “sucks”. It’s purposely built to handle as much as possible on device and not just piping information directly to Amazon or Google.
Good luck with an “AI” OS. People will find very quickly that Language Models, Machine Learning, and whatever buzzword of the week are NOT Artificial General Intelligence.
AGI is what people THINK today’s “AI” is, but it’s not. Very compelling responses from Bing or chatGPT may be convincing because it’s good at LANGUAGE, but when the data it spits out isn’t correct and the person who lazily hands it in as “their” work…they’re gonna be out of a job.
MS reps were beaming from ear to ear when they took my question about Endpoint Manager and fed it through Bing. It spit out step by step instructions, with the corresponding icons, and the link to the documentation…. I didn’t have the heart to tell them on that call that the link didn’t exist and the steps couldn’t be followed because that section of the Intune portal doesn’t even exist.
Hahaha I hooked siri up to ChatGPT via shortcut/api and to trigger a ChatGPT search I named the shortcut "You suck" so it goes, "Hey Siri, you suck" triggering chatgpt prompt =p