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John Gruber trashes Siri

Rogifan

Rogifan

macrumors Penryn
Original poster
Nov 14, 2011
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daringfireball.net

Siri Is Super Dumb and Getting Dumber

Siri with Apple Intelligence gives confident but embarrasingly wrong answers to sports trivia questions, both famous (Super Bowls) and obscure (North Dakota high school hoops).
daringfireball.net daringfireball.net

Read the whole thing. It is such a head scratcher that Siri never seems to get better. In Gruber’s example, Siri powered by ChatGPT was worse than the old Siri (which at least provided Google search results with the correct answer).The only consolation for Apple is Google search AI overview was just as bad. Small consolation.
 
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Rogifan said:
daringfireball.net

Siri Is Super Dumb and Getting Dumber

Siri with Apple Intelligence gives confident but embarrasingly wrong answers to sports trivia questions, both famous (Super Bowls) and obscure (North Dakota high school hoops).
daringfireball.net daringfireball.net

Read the whole thing. It is such a head scratcher that Siri never seems to get better. In Gruber’s example, Siri powered by ChatGPT was worse than the old Siri (which at least provided Google search results with the correct answer).The only consolation for Apple is Google search AI overview was just as bad. Small consolation.
Click to expand...
Siri is trash. There’s absolutely no way of getting around that fact. I love Apple products but Apple has dropped the ball so many times with Siri. There’s absolutely no excuse at this point.

Even something basic like what Apple was bragging about its off-line capabilities are not there. I asked Siri what’s 2+2 and it could not give me an answer without a network connection. Obviously, I know the answer, but this was a test of Siri. It should not need to phone home to Apple servers to come up with that answer.

Even when it has a connection, it fails at very basic things. I’ll try to get it to do something, thinking oh it should be able to do this but no.
 
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I agree, Siri has fallen way behind Google and Alexa.

And I still get messages from Siri that it can’t reach the Internet, even for things like playing music from my phone. I thought Siri was supposed to be able to handle requests like that on device by now…?
 
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Yeah Siri isn't just bad, it was literally better 10 years ago.

I do have confidence they'll get it sorted with the hooks into chatGPT though. That integration is still very early, and apple were clearly caught napping by the AI explosion and rushed the Apple Intelligence stuff out.

The ideas apple have (by that I mean AI integrated into tools to assist with specific tasks in an intelligent way) are good, they're just nowhere near baked yet.
 
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I nearly never use the "intelligent" features of Siri anymore, it is a complete disaster, especially in German. ChatGPT is so much better.

Exception: Sometimes I tell Siri via CarPlay to make a call or to write a message. That works in part but I use this only because I cannot type while driving.

There is one area where Siri has improved: You can today dictate better than 10 years ago. Still far from perfect, but usable.
 
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I keep Siri in this little conceptual box where I only ask it for things I already know it can handle, like:
- What's the weather today?
- Add feta to the grocery list.
- Turn off the bedroom lamp.
- Play WNYC-FM radio.

Try to push much past that, and I end up like Larry David in this Curb scene, just screaming at it and wanting to throw my phone in the toilet.

I honestly think at this point Siri is such trash that the name needs to be scrapped entirely and Apple should relaunch a new assistant with a new name altogether.
 
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throAU said:
Yeah Siri isn't just bad, it was literally better 10 years ago.

I do have confidence they'll get it sorted with the hooks into chatGPT though. That integration is still very early, and apple were clearly caught napping by the AI explosion and rushed the Apple Intelligence stuff out.

The ideas apple have (by that I mean AI integrated into tools to assist with specific tasks in an intelligent way) are good, they're just nowhere near baked yet.
Click to expand...

But that’s not Apple. They’re software/hardware. Not known for integrating a third party service. This is bad as easily predicted when it was announced.

ChatGPT was always a reluctant quick fix pivot to AI. A desperate one. But it’s always far better for Apple to do their own thing from the ground up. Which may happen eventually.

Clearly Siri is bad. One only has to check out ai bots or know what ChatGPT can do. This, what we’re seeing now, is not Apple coming in late and doing it better. It’s a disaster but they’re doing their best to sell it in the meanwhile as Apple intelligence. Thank goodness for the App Store and third party apps.
 
SegNerd said:
I agree, Siri has fallen way behind Google and Alexa.

And I still get messages from Siri that it can’t reach the Internet, even for things like playing music from my phone. I thought Siri was supposed to be able to handle requests like that on device by now…?
Click to expand...
A trillion dollar corporation wasting money on giving us a bunch of crap "features" we did not ask for and most don't want and rarely use, when what we really want is for them to produce a Siri that actually works.

I have replaced it with Perplexity.ai and set it so that Perplexity.ai is one of the two icons on the lock screen of my iPhone.

Only thing I use Siri for is to set reminders.
 
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They've proved they're too big to be sharp

Siri, they had the advantage! And now it's literally the worst of all assistants. There is no reason for this except for lack of control and lack of vision. Everyone does better now, and that's just shameful

And so many other things are quite broken in the basic apps that haven't been addressed for YEARS. It doesn't make sense that a company with their resources can't keep up their app base VERY well, let alone just let it go
 
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In Siri's defense, it's always been trash. It's probably the apple product I've had the most problems with on a consistent and chronic basis. It is true it has gotten much worse lately but it was never that great to begin with.
 
Apple Intelligence seems to have been rushed just like how iPhone X was rushed due to Galaxy S8 and S8+ release in 2017.

Prior to Apple Intelligence, when was the last major improvement to Siri?
 
It’s because they don’t have the right team anymore, they have hired people that don’t seem to understand
 
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Give me the first version of Siri, she was great! She heard everything I said, and even helped me find an apartment complex that didn't pop up at all during many google searches.
 
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The ONLY thing Siri is good for is announcing new calls or messages in your AirPods when listening to music. That's about it.

Oh, and setting an alarm.
 
Apple, like Microsoft before it, seems too big to fail, but its business model is overly reliant on the iPhone and its touchscreen interface.

I haven’t really rated its competitors in the past, but if any of them can come up with a usable, compelling verbal AI interface it could prove a real threat as we enter the post-smartphone era.
 
Lunatic Fireball (me) :

Apple, for some reason, is quite behind BOTH in HW AND SW these days. Everything except in-house integration that is. But you can’t do that much more with it than before.

You can either think it’s A) innovators dilemma where they just became too complacent (ego) B) Wanted to get as much ROI out of the market (ruthless) or C) Spent too much time, energy and money on Vision, the car and whatever else we haven’t seen. Or a combo.

Mind you, they’re still Apple, products still very good. But they’re not really the best anymore, it really hasn’t provided much incentive for customers to upgrade/buy their phones. They are just phones now….
 
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SebCohen said:
Lunatic Fireball (me) :

Apple, for some reason, is quite behind BOTH in HW AND SW these days. Everything except in-house integration that is. But you can’t do that much more with it than before.

You can either think it’s A) innovators dilemma where they just became too complacent (ego) B) Wanted to get as much ROI out of the market (ruthless) or C) Spent too much time, energy and money on Vision, the car and whatever else we haven’t seen. Or a combo.

Mind you, they’re still Apple, products still very good. But they’re not really the best anymore, it really hasn’t provided much incentive for customers to upgrade/buy their phones. They are just phones now….
Click to expand...

The question here is, how far can you go with phones? Not really that much further. They've known that for years.

Vision is the next personal device bet. It will take at least two more iterations before both society and tech practicality accepts it as mainstream. They might have got into it a generation too early, but Cook is probably still in for the long haul.

The car was the other big bet. It didn't work out. The reason is pretty simple I think - the tech wasn't ready for Apple. Apple's big fails have always been when they tried to actually innovate on their own, and with the state of the electric / self-driving car at the time, there was no way Apple was ready for it.

Apple is not an innovator in the new technology sense. Where they've massively succeeded is when they cherry-pick what already works and may still be in the early adopter stage, and iterate/re-mix it from a marketing-driven standpoint to make it socially acceptable as a premium consumer product (and effectively claim the technology innovation as as their own since your average idiot can't relate to anyone else).
 
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