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Comment by chocoboaus2 | Hacker News Reader

If Apple uses a third party to provide this what the heck has the Siri team been doing the last five years?

It takes a lot of effort to make the current version of a product much worse than the initial version. They did the same with the podcast app which used to be amazing, the new one I’m constantly fighting against because it keeps thinking I want to relisten to a podcast I just listened too, also the new version is slower and buggy.

>It takes a lot of effort to make the current version of a product much worse than the initial version.

My favorite example of this is how Siri used to give an audio confirmation that it is hearing me. This went away several iOS versions ago, and now I have to wait a few seconds then hope that I hear Siri's response; if not, I only then know that Siri did not hear my "Siri, ____" and have to start again. Even worse, maybe one out of ten times Siri does provide an audio confirmation at the start of listening! If there is some hidden iOS setting I can set to fix this, please let me know because I sure can't find it.

Odd, I just tried it and it still works normally for me. I say “Siri” and the device says “uh huh?”

Siri only does that when it hears "Siri" and nothing else, so a wait is still required. When I began using Siri it beeped when it began listening for more after "Hey, Siri", so I knew immediately that I could continue speaking.

I use Apple Music and it feels similarly buggier and with worse UX each time.

Apple put themselves in the corner with their privacy-first approach and local computations. To evolve AI you need to get all the data you can. It’s unsurprising that Apple progress was slow. And now they will pay to the Google who doesn’t hesitate to extract data from the users.

That's not the issue. LLMs are not trained on whatever crap you can scrape from users text messages or emails. That is relatively useless for training.

This. People are just trying to make excuses for apple's failure.

"They're failing because they're soooo privacy conscious"

Is Apple really failing? $30B net profit per quarter. Who knows what they are researching behind the scenes. They can afford to hire any top AI researchers. Siri is optimized for cost and performance on small devices. Works very well considering that it runs locally on the iPhone hardware.

Wouldn't the issue be Gemini would need access to the users personal information in order to act on it? Yes there are applications where this wouldn't be needed, but I can't help but think that the number one application of ai would be adding to the capabilities of the personal assistant. To me a personal assistant that couldn't draw on the context of my location, calendar, or communications wouldn't be much improvement.

If you believe the memes, Siri is already quite capable of searching Google for you.

> If you believe the memes, Siri is already quite capable of searching Google for you.

How is that a meme? It casually searches Google and summarizes the result when required. Siri runs locally on iOS and needs to use a search engine to lookup information.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/7/22522993/apple-siri-on-dev...

GPT-4 was trained on reddit posts...

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