Agreed that this can always be improved and hardware can get more efficient and better to but at the end of the day, would it ever be better then an API call ?
I use Siri a lot, mainly to add reminders, and sometimes I try to use Siri when I'm out at the greenhouse, which is just past the edge of the mesh network. I would love for those reminders to get added - even if it burnt battery.
And more generally I would love for people writing apps to consider that phones don't always have service - as would my neighbors.
It's not just that, this can also work completely offline.
It's even better that we are talking about a relatively low power machine here. Maybe can operate offered.
Simple thought experiment: you want to know how many tons of copper are mined in the US each year. Lowest possible latency is calculating this in your head, most likely using data you don’t have. Looking it up online is a lot, lot faster.
In some far future world maybe every transistor will include the sum total of human knowledge up to the nanosecond, but that’s a pretty far future. There are many things where running locally means a higher latency floor.