Siri Is Super Dumb and Getting Dumber

Apple recently announced they are disabling AI notification summaries for news apps in response to these high profile incidents. Seems like the entire feature should be rethought.

Not to defend the output--notification summaries clearly need work--but it used the BBC icon because it was summarizing the 20+ alerts sent to that user by the BBC app.

Did anyone gush about it at any point though.

Siri is probably one of the most, rightfully, panned product of all time.

Even the day it was released it was panned because it was a gimped version of the app Apple had bought from the App Store.

I don’t think it’s reached parity with the original 3rd party Siri to date (I believe you could, for example, buy movie tickets with the original Siri, which the Apple Siri hasn't ever been capable of doing).

When it used to have Wolfram|Alpha integration, that part was sorta good? Not sure why they dropped it so quickly.

Siri works for the only thing I care about it for - hands free commands like setting timers, reminders, directions, choosing playlists and calling and messaging people - including replies.

Mostly when I’m driving or when I don’t have my phone on me and just using my Watch on cellular.

Yes I know what ChatGPT can do and I use it all of the time.

iCloud and Apple mail I use because my family is all in on Apple devices (teens!) so photo sync and music just work better with Apple, and the domain support for Apple mail is nice (outlook dropped that, Gmail costs a lot more, and my family can’t grok fastmail). But it’s death but a thousand cuts

I know they throw shade on interoperability but I wish they would just make iCloud for web sort of work. You can’t create Task lists, only tasks on existing lists, you can’t attach PDF to Notes, you can’t download or upload a folder. It’s endless. And iCloud sync on windows, ice pick to noggin…

Siri is great at setting reminders (I see it's my friends birthday tomorrow or next week and want to remember to call them, I immediately say "Hey Siri, remind me on Tuesday at 1pm to text ____ happy birthday'), good when I start a load of laundry in my apartment building's communal basement laundry room, "Hey Siri, set a timer for 46 minutes", good at "Hey Siri, turn the lights off everywhere" to get the lights off using Homekit (now called Home?) when I'm in bed. Siri is great at "Hey Siri next song" when I'm listening to my Spotify discover weekly and don't like what it's playing and that is way easier than pulling my phone out and tapping a button.

I would argue Humans are bad at Siri, more than Siri is bad at ____.

Apple seems to regularly have crappy software that you're de facto locked into if you want their hardware. I care so much more about software. There's no hardware benefit that would get me to use iTunes.

My impression is that siri was purchased because it was speech recognition and text to speech. It seems that understanding what is asked is too much to expect, it doesn't seem part of the design.

I prefer Siri to Google Assistant. The latter is the epitome of retardedness. At least when used in German. "Hey Google, new appointment tomorrow at 14 o'clock: Clean kitchen." This used to work fine 7 years ago. Today this creates an appointment at fucking 2 in the morning and asks you what you want to name it. With Siri I don't have any of these problems.

It's bad because they're taking responsibility. Image Playground sucks because the training corpus consists only of imagery that they've created or otherwise have rights to. Siri sucks¹ because they're still handing most requests on-device, even for people who've turned on ChatGPT integration. What you're seeing is a company knowingly shedding short-term reputation points as they build a longer-term privacy-respecting solution.

¹ FWIW, Siri correctly answered all the "Who won Superbowl [n]" questions I threw at it just now on-device with iOS 18.3.

Those two examples both worked for me.

They aren’t even not the best. They’re well below par.

For example, Gruber shows that Apple Intelligence which uses ChatGPT, will give the wrong answers for questions which ChatGPT itself is right 100% of the time.

It requires effort to be that bad.

All of the intent based bots are bad. None of them use any form of “AI”.

You give them all a list of phrases to match (utterances) with variable parts (slots) and map them to “intents”.

You can build much better systems with LLMs now. I’ve built a few for call centers (Amazon Lex + Connect + Bedrock)

Any tool that empowers the user can be misused. Apple is so terrified that you'll misuse their technology that they spend most of their engineering effort preventing you from getting things done with it. Hence, Siri.

Of course this is sustainable only as long as they have no competition. But even the post-Jobs Apple has a limited glide ratio. They will eventually find that the walls they've built are better at confining the company itself than at corraling its customers.

> Why do we still hold Apple as a company in high regard […]

There is no "we". There's just a market (of products and of company shares) in which anyone can put their money where their preferences are and express their opinion.

the new airpods max also lost support for wired audio

It's so weird that some people see stock buybacks and dividends as a negative. I never understood that. In the long run, the most highly regarded companies prioritize shareholder returns. The idea that they should waste money on developing a car seems crazy.

He both can effectively be a 'shill' while also publishing the occasional critical article.

What makes daringfireball toothless isn't the ratio of praise to criticism. It's Gruber's occasional willingness to defend the absurd.

Stopped clock right twice a day, perhaps.