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Comment by parker_mountain | Hacker News Reader

> how garbage Siri quality is today

a few notes on this

- siri is incredibly underinvested. They have another team that's building some sort of search and natural language processing engine, that has slowly sapped away some key headcount from the siri team.

- apple doesn't get the full advantage of tons of user data from the wild. this is both a bug and a feature

- the siri api model is clearly generations old, and i suspect that apple has been marshaling its resources into a big leap forward - alongside their hand tracking, ar, and hardware

- apple has shipped everything required for you to point at a light /in your house/ to turn it on or off (and optionally flick). this includes software - the individual components are built and ready - the only thing missing is gluing it together

There's something happening, and I think that the rumored glasses are the hardware totem.

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“Yes Siri is garbage but it doesn’t matter because Apple are probably working on a top secret new thing that will blow everyone else out of the water”

You might be right but there’s no real evidence for it yet.

Lots of things with Apple come out of nowhere. In this case there's actually quite a bit more evidence than usual because of all the fielded, underutilized hardware that's ready to go— when it launches, it'll likely be available on millions of devices, rather than as something you have to get the latest hardware to have, as is the case when the camera or screen undergoes a drastic improvement, or there's a new feature like wireless charging or NFC payments.

Hasn't Siri remained relatively unchanged for over a decade? I think the most recent innovation was just bringing it to Intel Macs.

It has had features removed.

Yes, it's been stagnant for so very long that I, and I suspect most users, have learned the very few things that it can do reliably, and no longer even try to do something more sophisticated. If it became more capable, it might take a long while for most users to even notice, because we have stopped hoping it will pleasantly surprise us.

Most people didn’t notice, but dictation now runs in a hybrid mode — both on device and via server. So you get some (maybe poor) results at first (only results if offline but better than nothing) that get rewritten after a couple seconds from server.

For Siri itself, I think it runs locally now.

>because Apple are probably working on a top secret new thing that will blow everyone else out of the water”

that's a mischaracterization of what i said. what i said was that they have been clearly hiring key positions and cannibalizing the siri team for something new. that something new will likely be a major release. i also believe that the ar headset is the unifying product under which they're rallying.

You may well be right, but if so that's a huge problem for Apple as by all accounts the AR device is still many years from being ready for release and meanwhile they are in a very precarious situation with Siri...

The first proper integration of a Whisper & a GPT-class LM will be a big step change, a Siri-like AI that you can actually talk to somewhat sensibly and expect it to "understand" more than pre-set phrases... Google could be in a position to release something for Android, and their are Android SoCs with neural accelerators as well (sure nothing as impressive as Apple's chips but Samsung have demonstrated a cut-down SD model on their SoC).

I don't think the new siri is intrinsicly tied to the device. I think that as part of remaking siri, they're using the new platform as a rallying cry and story as to why it's important. (it's hard to justify features such as making siri spatially aware otherwise)

It's probably not glasses. Nobody likes wearing glasses. Every attempt at making tech glasses has failed. It'll probably be the Apple Watch.

Everybody would love wearing Apple Glasses. Would probably look really cool.

I remember seeing AirPods in somebody's ears for the first time. "What a dork" I thought back then. Now they're cool and everywhere.

> Now they're cool and everywhere.

One of these things is true.

There is a difference between the subjective and objective "cool." They've sold something like 150 million pairs of Airpods? I think that qualifies as objectively "cool."

Another heuristic is: are the majority of attractive and young people using/buying/doing it?

AirPods are cool by that measure as well.

If lots of people are doing or buying something, that’s a signal that it isn’t cool.

I would not love wearing them. I waste a significant amount of money on contact lenses each year for the privilege of not having to wear anything on my face.

I'm not a VR/AR fan but if Apple can come out with super high quality AR headset that can augment/replace monitors I would buy one instantly. I might be earlier than mainstream adopter but if the tech ever gets there this will be a natural shift.

I won't buy Meta products but I keep waiting for someone to do VR workspace right - where I can truly work and travel from anywhere with a decent chair and a desk for keyboard (no need to lug around monitors, no need for huge table).

I think that's it. I had half an hour to kill in a cafe yesterday, didn't bring my kindle, and I thought "if there were compact AR or even VR glasses that I could whip out to emulate a full-size working environment, that would be super handy right now".

Having said that, for me to spend money on it it would (a) also be able to realistically replace my set up at home, which currently consists of 2 HiDPI screens and (b) not be that much more expensive than what that cost me.

> apple has shipped everything required for you to point at a light /in your house/ to turn it on or off (and optionally flick). this includes software - the individual components are built and ready - the only thing missing is gluing it together

Could you expand on this bit? I’m pretty deep in the Apple ecosystem, but I’m not sure what you’re referencing here

Not OP, but I suspect this is a simple combination of AR and precise device location awareness. The former comes in the form of ARKit. I’m not aware of a framework for locating devices, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there were one.

U1 chip triangulation solves the second part. Would require at least 3 U1-enabled devices in your home.

Alternatively whole-home mapping via AR also solves this. No triangulation needed.

Homepods have U1 chips. They can position airtags within your house. You can put an airtag under, or adjacent to, a lamp and link it to a smart switch. Your apple watch has gesture detection (still in beta, tbf), as well as U1 and real time positioning capabilities.

Everything required for apple to know not only where you are, but which way your hand is pointing, as well as where "smart devices" are in your house is already being sold and rolled out en masse to the majority of people in the ecosystem.

$25 for an Airtag, plus say $20 for a smart switch. Plus $200 for a HomePod.

To turn a single lamp on/off by pointing at it, something that nobody ever wants to do (alright, once for the cool factor). If someone wanted to overpay for useless features, they can already go for a Philips Hue.

I can turn off my lamps from anywhere in the world using a $10 Tuta ZigBee bridge and a $8 LIDL light.

You sir, are not Apple’s target market.

Seems like Apple's target market is very narrow given homepod's weak sales

I think that this is one of those things that sounds like you'd never do it, but...

I've put zigbee switches into every wall switch in my house and now when I stay in hotels, I forget to turn off the lights before getting into bed.

>something that nobody ever wants to do

I think that this gesture, if it works well, is something that will be a killer app for smarthomes. The other point of friction, which is interop, has been more or less solved by thread/matter. Homepods are $100, btw. Not to mention what happens if apple integrates u1 into a smart switch/bulb, which is something that the thread protocol allows for.

Meanwhile you could use an iphone as a webcam for years by just buying an app,you could use an ipad as a cintiq by just buying an app, using your phone with your computer with kdeconnect also has been around for years. Pretty much nobody cared. Then apple came out with their branded version and suddenly you have people praising it as the best thing since sliced bread and great "innovation".

So my prediction would be that apple releases a ZigBee bridge and light for $50 in about 3 years and calls it a fancy name. People will tell you how absolutely essential and innovative it is and how you could never get that without an iDevice.

As an mere user this is what I had assumed. Siri has been stagnant and buggy for years; it makes sense they are working on a big replacement instead of putting resource into incremntal improvements on what seems to be a weak foundation.

> apple doesn't get the full advantage of tons of user data from the wild.

Do you think OpenAI did? Perhaps Apple doesn't have the vast amount of data that Google has, but if OpenAI managed to have like 200 wikipedia-sized corpuses of different textual data for their English GPT models, that's certainly not out of reach of Apple.

> apple has shipped everything required for you to point at a light /in your house/ to turn it on or off

Point at it? You mean with a finger? What do you mean they've shipped everything required?

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