I wonder if this has anything to do with their acquisition of DarwinAI. After a decade of mediocrity, I'd love to see Siri get smarter. Any improvement would be welcome at this point.
Maybe I find conversational UIs awkward, or maybe I just got jaded REALLY quickly from Siri’s lacking capabilities early on, but I have hardly used it in the decade or whatever that it’s been around.
I outsource so much of my memory to the phone via Siri ALL THE TIME. It’s so useful. Even for things in 20m. I’ll easily forget if I don’t do this, and it’s reliable so it gives me confidence. It also keeps the notification present until I actually do the thing, so I have a kind of string around my finger until the task is accomplished. I can also snooze that notification as needed to rebring it up at the right time.
Every time I do this around non-tech people they go “wow I didn’t know you could do that.” I swear it’s literally life changing, particularly for anyone over 30.
A year or so ago I remember someone pointing out in a podcast how LLMs are great at taking something like general language and turning it into a series of predefined commands (the stuff available to shortcuts). It would instantly make Siri much more useful.
I think Federico Viticci rigged up something similar or at least a powerful demo using Siri + Shortcuts + ChatGPT to be able to answer all sort of questions better than native Siri.
I can’t imagine reminders w/o Siri because that’s how I add 90%+ of them. Grocery items, things to do at time X, or when I get to (or leave) work/home are the big ones.
1. Find my phone via Siri on homepod
2. Set a simple timer
3. Add to a list
4. Send a text message to one of a few contacts
It can and sometimes does do all of those things, but horribly unreliably.
Google can also do this. Alexa has lots of problems, but it can raise a blind in a pinch. We also spent a ton on Lutron shades because we discovered that we were just managing them too much manually (Siri then is great for controlling that).
You can also ask Siri the weather in the morning, useful in figuring out how to dress the kid.
I like that I can model Siri as a decision tree with voice-activated input. Being able to configure it to do more things (for example, to put reminders in Things rather than Reminders), that would be useful. More discoverability would also be great (but this is Apple we're talking about, so good luck there). But for me personally, the most important feature is that Siri is predictable: once I figure out how to do something with it, asking again in mostly the same way will get the same result. If I want to talk to an LLM, I have ChatGPT on my phone.
It’s not perfect, for sure:
Me: Hey Siri, turn off the kitchen lights.
Siri: I can’t process multiple requests.
Me: Hey Siri, turn off the kitchen lights.
Siri: OK.
But it works reliably enough that I use it all the time for the reminder and timer actions. Is it vastly worse for other people, and in what ways?
Over time Siri got better. Not great but better. Alexa had mostly stayed the same or perhaps gotten a touch worse except for adding ads and other annoyances.
I’ve never used anything but Siri. It works decently, definitely has its moods/dumb-as-a-post moments. But I’ve learn what works well and for that it’s proven very useful.