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Comment by mensetmanusman | Hacker News Reader

Please Apple let me replace worthless Siri with ChatGPT on my iPhone.

Would completely change how I use the device.

If you have the new iPhone with the action button, you can set a shortcut to ask questions of ChatGPT. It’s not as fluid as Siri, and can’t control anything, but still much more useful.

Just yesterday, while driving: "Read last message."

Siri: "Sorry. Dictation service is unavailable at the moment."

It's past time for excuses. High-level people at Apple need to be fired over this. Hello? Tim? Do your job. Hello? Anybody home...?

Nobody is switching away from Apple over this, so ultimately Tim is doing his job. Under his watch Apple has become the defacto choice for entire generations. Between vendor-lockin/walled gardens and societal/cultural pressures (don't want to be a green bubble!), they have one of the stickiest user bases there are.

True, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t complain.

My hope is that the upcoming eu rulings allow competition here. Ie force Apple to get out of the way of making their hardware better with better software.

Stop excusing shitty work from trillion-dollar companies. It makes the world a worse place.

I think it's shitty and has no excuse, but the parent is right. Apple has no incentive to respond to their users since all roads lead to first-party Rome. It's why stuff like the Digital Market Act is more needed than some people claim.

You know what would get Apple to fix this? Forced competition. You know what Apple spends their trillions preventing?

agreed. I'm not trying to "excuse" shitty work, merely observing the incentives/pressures on them. We can complain about it all we want, but we won't understand it until we understand the incentives.

I think that's a bit glib. Right now it's true that nobody's going to leave the Apple camp because of Siri, but it's also true that nobody's going to leave the Android camp because of it. That state of affairs could change.

It's not a time for complacency, if only because driver assistance is becoming more important every day. There are good, sound business reasons to put competent people on the Siri team.

Apple is ramping up spending in that area: https://www.macrumors.com/2023/09/06/apple-conversational-ai...

It’ll probably take a while though.

Yeah, at this rate they'll be at parity with Infocom by 2030.

So their customers will have a difficult time figuring out that they should put a fish in their ear?

Wait'll you see what they charge for hints.

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