Have we been using the same Siri? The only thing I trust it with is starting a timer. Everything else is literally a coin flip if it’ll actually understand me or mangle my request into something ludicrous.
It keeps mishearing "a lamp" as "alarm", and goes into alarm setting mode even if the rest of the query makes no sense.
When told to turn of specific lights, it sometimes ignores the room/qualifier, and turns all lights off in the whole house.
Many other queries end up "I can't find <what you said> in your Music library".
Siri is three regexes in a trench coat.
Doesn't this Shortcut use the same voice recognition? Doesn't seem like a problem GPT solves.
2. This particular implementation is limited to operating on an English text in its finalized form, but a different first-class LLM implementation of an AI assistant could work directly on some form of phonetic input. ChatGPT is pretty good at dealing with such ambiguities, e.g. it already understands questions written in IPA notation. It also understands Japanese written in romaji, which is a non-native phonetic spelling of a language with tons of homonyms.
But Apple is getting better, with Siri pulling up a relevant website and reading me the first bit, and offering to go further. I used this yesterday when I was driving and talking to my kid about biology; we looked up "cytoplasm" and various other technical terms, and it gave accurate definitions with sources noted. The only thing it failed to do was to tell us how many kingdoms of life there are (but from looking at Wikipedia it appears this question is not quite cut-and-dried).
Pretty sure Apple and Amazon are capable of improving their voice-assistants, the question is whether they decide to invest into it. OpenAI is relatively young and is "quicker" than large orgs, as it's a startup with top-notch talent.
They began as very much what you describe though, to generate pr and make their underlying ecosystems seem more attractive and advanced.
[0] https://archive.is/UlCpM / https://www.amazon.science/blog/alexas-head-scientist-on-con...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/qai/2022/12/06/amazon-stock-new...
Maybe the new tech worked _really well_.
Apple appears to try to make Siri an well defined interface to specific apps that offer specific services.
Looking at https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sirikit you can see specific intents and workflows that Siri can hook into. This makes it rather limited but for the things that it can do, it does. To that end, Apple isn't trying to monetize Siri - its trying to be a hands free interface to specific tasks that apps can do.
Amazon was trying to make Alexa a general tool (and they've reduced those capabilities over the years) running on AWS with additional goals of providing additional monetization routes. Things like "A book by an author you follow was released, would you like to add it to your cart?" Personally, I never found the chat more than a curiosity and even less so now that there is no knowledge engine backing the general knowledge questions.
Even with the most common use cases it doesn't even try. One coder, one evening, simple pattern matching + a few rules and it could be improved so much. I simply don't understand how they can keep it so bad for so long. There were more examples like this, I don't really have a list since I gave up on it.
Your example requests are at best extreme outliers, and not good tests of smart home assistants.
It seems like ChatGPT could be a giant leap ahead of the current crop of home assistants.
Exactly what I've been thinking in the last 10 years. It was ludicrously bad, and not improving even on obvious things. They just sat on it.