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Comment by swatcoder | Hacker News Reader

They "leapfrogged" Google on providing a natural language interface to the world knowledge we'd gotten used to retrieving throug web search. But Apple's never done more than toyed in that space.

Apple's focus has long been on a lifestyle product experience across their portfolio of hardware, and Apple Intelligence appears to be focused exactly on that in a way that has little overlap with OpenAI's offerings. The partnership agreement announced today is just outsourcing an accessory tool to a popular and suitably scaled vendor, the same as they did for web search and social network integration in the past. Nobody's leapfrogging anybody between these two because they're on totally different paths.

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Siri is a toy, but I don't think that was Apple's intent. It's been a long-standing complaint that using Siri to search the web sucks compared to other companies offerings.

Apple's product focus is on getting Siri to bridge your first-party and third-party apps, your 500GB of on-device data, and your terabyte of iCloud data with a nice interface, all of which they're trying to deliver using their own technology.

Having Siri answer your trivia question about whale songs, or suggest a Pad Thai recipe modification when you ran out of soy sauce, is just not where they see the value. Poor web search has been an easy critique to weigh against Siri for the last many years, and the ChatGPT integration (and Apple's own local prompt prep) should fare far better than that, but it doesn't have any relevance to "leapfrogging" because the two companies just aren't trying to do the same thing.

That's the complaint! They play in the same space, they just don't seem to be trying. Siri happily returns links to Pad Thai recipes, it's not like they didn't expect this to be a use-case. They just haven't made a UX that competes with others.

And it's not just web search! Siri's context is abysmal. My dad routinely has to correct the spelling of his own name. It's a common name, there are multiple spellings, but it's his phone!

My favorite thing with names is I have some people in my contacts who have names that are phonetically similar to English words. When I type those words in a text or email, Siri will change those words to people’s names.

Ah yes, them saying “we’re bad at it on purpose, but are scrambling to throw random features in our next release” is definitely a great defense.

Apple bought Siri 14 years ago, derailed the progress and promise it had by neglect, and ended up needing a bail out from Sam once he kicked their ass in assistants.

Call it whatever you want.

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