Ask HN: GPT4 is out and Apple's Siri still sucks. What is Apple's strategy? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: GPT4 is out and Apple's Siri still sucks. What is Apple's strategy?

17 pointsbehnamoh22 comments

Apple is known for waiting for technologies to mature so that they can offer them better than the competition. We saw that with large screen iPhones, touch ID, and several iOS features. But Siri and autocorrect in 2023 are as good (read $hitty) as they were a few years ago.

I have been using GPT-3 in a shortcut on my Apple Watch and can't but wonder what Apple is doing to catch up. I now ask my questions from my own GPT personal assistant instead of Siri and it works much much better.

I feel like if Apple doesn't say anything about LLMs in WWDC, it will be officially its biggest loss after the death of Steve Jobs.

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> I feel like if Apple doesn't say anything about LLMs in WWDC, it will be officially its biggest loss after the death of Steve Jobs.

This is a bit silly. What will they have lost, exactly?

I think they’re likely scrambling right now like every company with a speech-to-text or AI-type product. And they’ll be angling to do it in an Apple way — released when they feel confident they have a great product.

I wouldn’t put it past them to discuss it before they launch, however — they’ve been looser-lipped in the last years (ie abt their headset), I would guess to keep mindshare, basically.

For now they have only lost out on hype. There are some nice AI products about to roll out, but haven’t yet(announced, limited availability) and are definitely not polished for mainstream use.

Hopefully Apple will rearchitect Siri at some point.

Other then that, I’ll wait and see which “AI products” from the past months will actually still be relevant in 6 months from now.

Apple is already rolling out new text-to-speech models to automate audio book narrations on their ebook platform. Having heard the samples, it sounds better than most tts models available. I imagine apple already has plans in place to integrate _some _ new Ai tools into their products, but I think they will probably wait for things to settle before making a bigger commitment.

I think apple is well positioned to either buy an AI startup or integrate open source projects into their ecosystem and create a “Her” like product. Where a context aware assistant is consistent across your various operating systems. I don’t think any of the other vendors have quite the ecosystem to pull it off.

Apple has been lagging behind Google for a while, and now Microsoft.

That being said, Apple is rarely the first adopter of new tech. So, this seems to be in line with their default strategy.

Apple did fine after the death of Steve Jobs, so I don't think that analogy is valid either.

Right now, Apple being a consumer/fashion/tech company, LLMs are not an existential threat to their business.

I hope they buy and back some of these companies building local/on-prem capable models to run locally on iOS. Add in some proprietary ML chip tech to run it efficiently on mobile and they will capture a big market. Having intimate personal assistant requests uploaded to MSFT/OpenAI is a deal breaker for me.

Could you imagine the bad PR if Siri spits out wrong answers, politically charged answers, fake answers, or creepy answers?

For example, imagine the huge PR nightmare if Siri explains to you how to make a bomb at home or how to hijack a plane.

Also, GPT4 does not hook into iOS, macOS, iPadOS APIs.

I think a company like Apple will be very careful. Their brand, which they're extremely careful with, would be on the line and they can't risk it on a chat bot that is sometimes very creepy, sometimes makes up answers.

That said, I'm sure Apple is scrambling internally to create an equivalent.

Just take a look at /r/SiriFail and you'll see it does a lot of what you're saying already.

There is a difference between Siri failing to understand what the user said and extremely creepy messages from Bing Chat.

Like the time when you could ask Siri where to hide a body and it would show you the directions to the nearest quarry

Wait till they understand the market, then dominate. Just like normal.

OP (or others) can you please share how you are using chatgpt instead of Siri on iPhone and Apple Watch?

My money would be that they're internally really advanced on the tech, but unlike other companies, they don't embrace it in public because for Apple, first impressions matter.

So if Siri gets a lift, wether it will be progressive or as a new persona, it's likely to come out reasonably strong, after everyone.

Alexa is also to follow.

Home integration of things still sucks, so really the big move forward for Siri/Alexa will be AGI - the future is proactively taking care of things, rather than assist you with your next resume.

I question how big the market really is for voice activated personal assistants. Very few people seem to actually want to use them beyond novelty/gimmick. Personally, I would always just prefer to pull out my phone and do whatever I need to do there, it's already insanely convenient and in most cases seems to be superior UX.

I think if it becomes more efficient to use voice people will. Imagine driving and talking to your phone seamlessly getting 10 tasks from your todo list done by talking. Hey bot can you call so and so find out when x is happening and then add it to my calendar please.

> Hey bot can you call so and so find out when x is happening.

Why would “so and so” be willing to talk to your bot? Chances are they won’t get “so and so”, but so and so’s bot on the line.

With the current state of the art, that bot, guided by the question “when will x happen”, may make up that it will happen and make up a date and time, even though it was cancelled last week. Next, your bot might inform the bots of a few friends that the thing is on, book a flight for you to go there, etc.

That won’t always happen, of course, but even if it’s a 1:10,000 chance, I wouldn’t take it, as it could be a costly mishap.

Eventually, as a human you wont know if you are talking to their bot!

I think its hard to predict given the current quality of voice assistants. I dont think we can answer that until a high quality assistant is availble.

That's because the current crop of voice assistants is dumb as rocks. Siri has good integration with respect to being able to control your phone, but very, very poor NLP. Google Home has the best human language processing and feature set out of the lot. Amazon Echo has... neither, to put it mildly. It's good as a kitchen timer, but that's about it.

Once we have assistants that can actually do something useful and specific to your life instead of just setting timers, and looking up what the capital of France is, there would be more demand. I know I'd pay for one, especially if it was open-source and self-hostable.

I guess they’re working on something: https://9to5mac.com/2023/03/16/apple-testing-siri-natural-la...

Apple will just integrate Bing GPT chat into Siri in exchange for keeping Bing default on apple products instead of Google. All of their leverage comes from owning the hardware

Couldn't they just buy the entire company?

No, they can't, Microsoft acquired 50% of OpenAI.

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