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Comment by solardev | Hacker News Reader

Wow, this is... underwhelming. Some text summaries for apps nobody use, and minor Siri improvements that bring it up to par where Google Assistant was 5-10 years ago? Even the "do you want to change it, or send it?" prompt is straight outta Android. It also seems like they copied Google Photos and Gmail features.

And the place a better Siri would be really useful, Apple TV, isn't included at all :(

All that marketing for this...? None of these things require a dramatic new AI chip or months of announcements. They're minor improvements at best.

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FWIW, the more major things aren't included yet. Image generation, emoji, Siri improvements haven't arrived yet.

I know this is an honest response, but it's a bit funny that most (if not all) of those features are not useful at all in daily applications. And they will be added in the future™!

I am with you on that. I am an Apple user for sure (TV, macbook, macpro, iphones, ipads, avp), but this whole Apple AI is just ridiculous, they are so behind. Even integration with ChatGPT is laughable, with very questionable interface, no history through that interface.

I just don't understand why we are protecting so much Apple in that case. They have ability to do better, and the company is not going to the right route in the last few years.

Behind what? Windows chatgpt interface? Apple has been quietly adding AI features, sometimes with no equal. For example, having OCR being built in everywhere in the OS is amazing. I've used it many times already, but it's a quiet seamless addition so I guess people don't notice.

Their photos improvements are pretty solid, bringing closer to par with Google photos. Their translation and voice recognition/dictation are state of the art. Their photo processing is equal or better than Googles. Not really seeing where they are "so behind" to be honest.

"so behind" in that after months of pumping themselves up through glossy marketing they are now just barely on parity with Google Pixel's AI feature set?

C'mon man.

> months of pumping themselves up through glossy marketing

I don’t think I’ve come across their marketing outside tech-specific channels, who are reporting on it because AI gets clicks.

If you aren't seeing them, it is more likely to how you handle ads in your everyday experience. They have a very active ad campaign that I've see on several TV channels and streaming services (mainly Prime ads)

https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/apple-intelligence-de...

They might be behind but at least consider that it's because they've seen what "the future" of this technology looks like and aren't at all impressed.

The only reason they're even implementing the current feature set is because of pressure from investors.

The first large title at apple.com right now is "Apple Intelligence is here". The last 10 or so Ads from Apple are all about Ai.

Which is not true, it is not here. The features are very limited, and there is not a lot of them, and a lot of people are getting on waitlist right now (based on the Reddit comments).

I really hope that there is going to be a class action lawsuit against Apple, as they are doing exactly what Elon Musk, Google and Microsoft liked to do for so long, trying to sell you something that does not exist.

It's obvious they just shoehorned this stuff in after missing the bus. Now they made the promises, and are working feverishly to deliver in order to protect the stock price.

It's sad really. They could have had the "courage" to say, you know what, there's not much to LLMs yet. We've been shipping NPUs since 2017 and already use ML across our ecosystem to improve the user experience, but we're not going fall for the AI hype. We'll continue shipping useful features as they become ready. And hey, you already have lots of ways to do gen stuff with apps!

But no, instead we get THE FIRST IPHONE BUILT FROM THE GROUND UP FOR AI!!!1!1! which... doesn't even ship with it and when they finally roll it out it's... standard gen stuff. And not even all that great compared to what you can already do, even local.

Which apps had you supposed no one is using? I can't say the summaries in Mail, Messages, and random notifications on my Mac have been super useful yet, although I just started using those features. The summaries I have looked at due to the novelty of the feature have been satisfactorily accurate.

I welcome the writing tools. I'd been using Grammarly as a glorified text and grammar checker. While I have zero interest in using it or any other AI tool to write text, it's nice for finding minor mistakes like using the the same word twice in a sentence. And now I have something free and built-in that's as good as Grammarly at the things I want to use it for.

It's nice that it's built in but I would have preferred they wrote an API for it and let apps provide the service. There's no particular reason we should have to use Apple's models. I already do all the same things locally with ollama with my choice of models.

Siri already works great with Apple TV.

Have you actually used Apple Intelligenge? It sounds like you don’t even use iOS, so not sure how you’re able to judge “minor improvements at best.”

Also privacy. That’s substantially different than Android or anything from Google.

It's called a "soft opening".

Apple said they had to delay rolling out some of the features they had planned for this release.

Fortunately for users the features cost them nothing.

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