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Comment by bentt | Hacker News Reader

This is a great example of when a company needs to make a new product and not simply add capability to an old one. They decided to go with Apple Intelligence, which was partway there, but leveraging Siri branding is a mistake. It's also an organizational nightmare. Ok Siri people, go continue to support all the zillions of users you currently have and all their bizarre use cases, and we'll just one day make Siri smarter? Bad idea.

They need to leave Siri behind and make a whole new thing, roll it out to their most loyal and spendy customers, and then let it make its way down the customer chain as it gains more capability.

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> They need to leave Siri behind and make a whole new thing

Keep Siri! Siri can become the dumb, reliable agent. When I want my garage door opened, I ask Siri. When I want something more thoughtful, I ask this other thing.

Right I mean leave it behind in its current garage door opener form.

i have found nothing in my usage to suggest that current Siri can reliably open a garage door. Or do anything else - it’s actively worse than 5 years ago.

To the extent that it's worse, it's worse because they try to layer more stuff on top of it that ends up conflicting with the basic set a timer, trigger HomeKit, send a text message functionality.

Yep, a particular example:

A few major iOS releases ago when you said “Hey Siri, wake me up in an hour”, it correctly set an alarm in now() + 60 minutes. Nowadays if you don’t say an absolute time, it sets a timer instead of an alarm. I used relative times when taking naps so this regression is a UX change for worse for me.

I remember when Siri replaced the original voice recognition. “Call XYZ” etc. after a long press of the wired remote.

To this day, it’s less reliable. Also Siri can’t text my wife who has two phone numbers in my address book. Although there is just a single iMessage chat - Siri always asks (Which one? - without offering options!!!)

The old farts in Apple management need to go and pronto.

The ossification of the entire management layer is really reall frightening and a terrible sign for a company.

I bet we saw peak Apple in 2023/24.

The worst part is when I ask Siri to call or text my partner, and then the phone goes ahead and calls a different person with a vaguely similar sounding name that I have had no contact with in a decade. Why Siri?

Or when I ask for directions to a hardware store, and I get a result 300km away across a national border...

This is exactly what Google did, probably for this exact reason: When you want to use Gemini instead of Google Assistant, you need to actively go and "change" the assistant that's on your phone. You can switch back whenever, but you choose if you want the old reliable behaviour or the fancy new AI.

I don't work there, so this is just a guess. It's likely a "whole new thing" with Siri being the name kept for marketing.

They need to keep existing Siri capabilities, including third-party app integrations (SiriKit, Siri Shortcuts). That’s difficult to make consistent with a “whole new thing”.

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