If it were not for the impending headset, Apple would look a wee bit caught out as well.
I suspect once Apple turns toward gen ai, all of its other advantages (infra, hw, instal base, services, etc) will propel it to forefront.
I suspect once Apple turns toward gen ai, all of its other advantages (infra, hw, instal base, services, etc) will propel it to forefront.
Still, I suspect the AI stuff will be hard for them. They were first to market with Siri and it’s still trash 13yrs(?!) later. It’s always been what they’re weakest at, I’m not sure LLMs will be different for them.
The headset could still give them a nice hardware platform advantage though if that UX becomes the main new interface.
However, the company has deployed machine learning in support of its neural engine which has a huge amount of penetration. This has already shown the iOS fleet ready to do gen AI at the edge.
The company has focused largely on STT and image processing but has worked to support use of the chip for general ML, via transformer. [1]
I’d say Apple’s only failed in the way everyone did—-failure to foresee and the potential impact of generative AI.
Apple seemed unable find a use case that would help its ecosystem. I am surprised it never releases copilot like behavior to Xcode. When will this occur?
[1] https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/neural-engine-tra...
This is so true that now the only differentiating capability is execution, and I'd say that Microsoft is excelling here in an unexpected way.
They bought Siri! What stops them from buying someone for "ai"
The system provided intents ( https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sirikit ) are rather limited. While we can say "it should be more" the architecture for it doesn't appear to be something that easily extensible by anyone (Apple included).
However, for those intents - it does quite well and most processing is done on device rather than in the cloud and that fundamentally changes the economics and capability. It is much less expensive than Alexa to run (where nearly everything is in the cloud), but it is also something that can't do as much.
Try this - turn on airplane mode and do "hey Siri what time is it?" or "hey Siri open notes" And while those are indeed a very limited examples (there are other examples such as interacting with HomeKit where it needs the lan), it shows that much of the work is done on the phone.
This also means that its capabilities are limited to what you can run on the phone.
We'll see if that changes.
When you look at SiriKit when compared to Google and Alexa, it is an entirely different approach that isn't designed for general tooling of a voice assistant but rather the intents show that it is designed for specific functionality of specific types of applications.
Asking Siri for things outside of those intents was always delegated out to some other service (Wolfram Alpha was the choice for a while).
Siri was never designed to try to monetize the voice interface (compare Alexa and Google) and thus wasn't trying to do everything and SikiKit shows that it can't do quite a bit. So that it can't do everything shouldn't be a surprise to Apple.
Comparing Siri to Alexa, they are very different architectures with different goals and support costs.
If you look at https://www.apple.com/siri/ you should get the idea that this is interface to common tasks - not a general "do everything and chat about it" assistant. What's more, it limits what goes off device (whereas Alexa and Google do all speech to text on the cloud).
"Your intelligent assistant that helps you get things done just by asking"
I suspect Scott Forstall and Jobs wanted it to be what LLMs show the potential for it to be. Not the crappy barely functioning timer setting app it currently is.
Siri is dumb as rocks, it's so bad at basic queries it's not worth trying to use.
Those were the intents that were set up.
Yes, it would be nice to have LLM style power - but that isn't how Siri was architected even from the very start. Word combinations are recognized as certain intents and parsed for functions to call into apps that register that they are able to handle that function call.
If there was no match for the intent, it was sent to Wolfram Alpha to do a knowledge base lookup. While Wolfram is really good, it certainly isn't a chat bot.
Siri wasn't supposed to be smart. Siri was intended for an interface to the existing apps of phone, music, messages, calendar, reminders, map routes, email, and weather.
When you look at that segment, 12:48 "just take your phone and ask Siri to set a timer for 30 minutes and you're done." Siri was very much intended as a timer setting app.
What functionality in there that you see in this segment that isn't designed as an interface to existing apps? What time cue do you see them promising something smarter than what was designed?
Since that time in 2011 it has gotten no closer to “intelligent assistant”. That’s a failure imo.
Google’s is much better at answering basic queries.
Siri is an interface to a limited set of the apps on the iPhone.
These are fundamentally different architectures for how how each was designed along with implications for privacy and where the company has compute resources that can be used.
If you are after a general knowledge search engine, Google will certainly out preform Siri.
Google has better cloud integration for a lot of their functionality. Apple doesn't have that amount of cloud resources that it can use and is a device first company rather than a cloud first company.
If you want to say "android can search google better" Ok. I'll grant that. If that makes it "smarter" - ok. Android is smarter than Siri because it can search google better.
If you want to say "android can control apps on its phone better" - I really want to see evidence that the ability for Android to control 3rd party music apps (e.g. Spotify) or report the weather or calendar or set up alarms... I don't believe that android is any better than Siri in that regard.
If you want to chat with it (e.g. "what is the answer to life the universe and everything?") then those are cute responses that are programmed in.
Do you have other criteria that you are using to compare the different devices other than its ability to search Google?
Siri will often uselessly "find results on the web and send them to my iPhone". Google can answer more queries directly as well as do basic timer setting stuff. The thing you're missing is the implementation detail is irrelevant to the end user, it's an issue of capability.
Your point about Apple being worse at cloud is partly what I'm talking about (and one of the reasons siri is so much worse). It's why Apple has not done a good job with this up until now. I don't buy the "it's intentionally not capable/bad by design because that's what they were going for" argument.
My prediction is Apple will make some sort of move here. Whether that's an investment in stable diffusion or something else I don't know. I expect what they do to have an apple flavor (on-device, privacy focused), but I think it will be leveraged to make Siri actually useful (and more of an actually intelligent and capable assistant).
Expecting Apple (or any company) to be chasing the current hype is more likely to be disappointing (see Google and Bard or Bing and its mistakes). Apple, with its very cautious nature for curation of its brand image would likely be some time out.
I would also point out that Apple's prominent place in regulatory views would make it more hesitant to do things that they may have to open up.
Wait until after the regulatory dust has settled... and after the various lawsuits about copyright infringement or section 230 and GPT have settled ( https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-tech/chatgpt-i... ).
I don't believe that Apple has any appetite for becoming more of a target for government regulators or wading into untested legal waters. But that's my crystal ball - yours apparently sees different things.
What made google amazing was it settled conversational disputes or provided instant (if limited) familiarity on a subject. Siri fails to provide verbal feedback on relatively simple questions, instead referring people to their iPhones for "web results."
As an end user, the product's failure understand or make sense of the intent of a user is even harder to deal with in Home / HomeKit. I often find myself pulling up the Home app to hunt down and manually operate some accessory because voice requests are just failing.
Common patterns happen throughout a home covered in HomeKit and Homepods and yet this AI is unable to provide reasonable suggestions for automation modifications, scene tweaks or suggestions for additional accessories.
Siri-based requests for songs or albums from Apple Music on HomePod is abysmal, providing covers, or flat out wrong genre, wrong era that my listening habits should well weight away from.
It is just bad--architecture design be damned the product fails under "normal" use. Outwardly, it seems like a MobileMe-level failure, where SJ asked at a town hall "Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?"
All that said, I agree with this comment that it is a mistake to expect Apple to integrate LLM that uses any known model into its product.
Even if Apple wanted to, I don't know where the company could source data that is manicured to "safe" enough to serve as a basis for responses by Siri.
It doesn't really matter, to end users how they fix it.
The company's job is to drop the product or iterate until it figures out how to better satisfy they end user.
Long time Android user here, only iPhone since 3 years ago:
Siri I use to set timers and I sometimes use its unsolicited suggestions.
Google only tried to make practical jokes on my expense, like suggesting I call the customers CTO or text a friend-of-a-friend at 0400 in the morning.
One single time I can remember Google actually getting a suggestion correct.
This probably works better today than four years ago and maybe it always worked better if you were in a US timezone and spoke American English, but with Siri setting timers at least works and a few times a year it comes up with smart suggestions.
(Yes, I'm not too impressed with Siri either.)
I had expected Apple to produce its own version of GitHub, but the space is apparently too messy.
The earliest value of open AI is similarly messy. Lots of press about how to jailbreak or trick the thing. Bad answers or questions about legality of what the models produce.
None of that comes anywhere near where apple can use its strengths. It just opens new surfaces that require expertise the company doesn’t have.
[1] - https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/01/23/microsoftandopen...
Apple is good at a lot of things but it is AWFUL at AI. Siri is still the worst experience you can have with a language model. That said, all they need to do is integrate some OpenAI API's. In which case, Microsoft STILL wins because of its investment there and where OpenAI's enormous compute happens - which is likely in Azure.
The thing is, a voice assistant needs to actually perform Natural Language Understanding -- it has to understand the intent of what's being said to it. That's actually a very different AI problem than what LLMs are doing at this point. Samsung's Bixby -- yes, the one everyone turns off -- can handle a "conversation" like this: (This is run using the "Space Resorts" sample capsule, a fictitious hotel booking system)
---
User: Show me hotels near Mars
Bixby: I found these space resorts on Mars. (Shows two, “Martian Oasis” and “Space Y”)
User: [taps Martian Oasis] make a reservation for Christmas week
Bixby: Which habitat pod would you like? (Shows two)
User: Honeymoon
Bixby: Are you sure you want to book this trip? (Shows the hotel, “Number of astronauts: 2”, and the dates for Christmas week)
User: change the astronauts to 4
Bixby: (Shows the sam confirmation screen, with the number changed)
User: Yes
Bixby: I hope you have a great time at Martian Oasis. (Shows booking info)
---
Now, in some ways this is no great shakes, but I don't think "all [Apple] needs to do is integrate some OpenAI APIs," because they don't have an API for NLU and deriving intent. GPT4 et. al. aren't currently designed for this kind of problem space. You could use them to make Siri (and Bixby and Alexa) better at answering general questions, but you can't use them to make the voice assistant do something, just respond to something.
Bixby 2 (the current version) is, incidentally, what came out of Viv, the voice AI startup that the Siri folks made after they left Apple.
It'll be interesting to see, anyway.
so far, there's nothing. there's only vague rumors, or not even - just assumptions that "surely apple will do something about this", "they'll turn to ai eventually". well, they have siri. which doesn't exactly inspire hope for much.
A previous VR wave failed in the '90s. If this one fails, too, we' ll see another in 20 years.
if Tim Cook wants $10 bln in new profits, he can simply pass some arbitrary judgement like "the next iPhone will only be compatible with new AirPods we will introduce at the same time" and everyone will comply