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Comment by kyle-rb | Hacker News Reader

>ever wonder why Siri doesn't work as well as Google Assistant for a lot of people?

You have some valid points on your post, but praising the inferiority of software based on perceived limitations of increased security focus seems like Apple cult-of-personality type stuff.

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It's an established fact that Apple has traditionally refused to just use all of their user recordings as training data, and is willing to accept worse voice recognition as a result.

I'm not sure I exactly follow, but anyway it's easy to find comments online from people who've worked at Apple recently who talk about how this is actually a logistical problem. Apple can't just throw data at their issues until things work like e.g. Google can, specifically because they do not collect as much data in the first place.

> as much

Ah, so they're the privacy option because they only collect a lot of data, not gobs and gobs of data?

Yes?

You can disable Siri if you want.

You don't need to use location-based software.

Basically everything on an iPhone that collects data doesn't need to be used, and when it does collect data it's because it is usually needed.

They're the privacy option because the data they collect is heavily restricted. Consider my earlier example of the navigation identification tokens — Apple has a similar "amount" of data, but it's significantly less useful in its raw form than Google's. But Apple makes the choice to collect data in that way because it helps protect users' privacy.

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