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Comment by eitland | Hacker News Reader

> It’s rudimentary, but already more useful to me than Siri!

For me, that is an extremely low barrier to cross.

I find Siri useful for exactly two things at the moment: setting timers and calling people while I am driving.

For these two things it is really useful, but even in these niches, when it comes to calling people, despite it having been around me for years now it insist on stupid things like telling me there is no Theresa in my contacts when I ask it to call Therese.

That said what I really want is a reliable system I can trust with calendar acccess and that is possible to discuss with, ideally voice based.

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I went through this weird experience with Cortana on WP7, where I found it incredibly useful to begin with, and then over time it got worse. It seemed like it was created by some incredibly talented engineers. I used it to make calls while driving, set the GPS and search for information while I drove. But over time, it seemed to change behaviour and started ignoring my commands, and when it did accept them, it seemed to refer me to paid advertisers. And considering bing wasnt even as popular as it is now, 10 years ago, a paid advertiser could be 100km away.

Which I think is a path that people haven't considered with LLMs. We are expecting them to get better forever, but once we start using them, their legs will be cut out to force them to feed us advertising.

I've had the same issues of decay. I used to be able to say "call Mom" but now it will call some kid's mom who I have in Contacts as "[some kid's] mom". What is the underlying architecture that simple heuristic things like this can get worse? Are they gradually slipping in AI?

I always say "call my mom" and it'll pick it up from contacts -> relationships correctly

Clearly you need to make some slight spelling changes to your contacts... ;)

I feel like the standard Apple response is "if it isn't working correctly you just aren't using it right"

I still regularly experience a bug where my mac sends sound to speakers instead of a plugged in headphone jack after waking up from sleep. 10 years ago when I first looked into it the official Apple response was "that's not possible with the hardware" and we haven't made any progress since. Gaslighting as a service I guess.

Luckily I can just unplug and plug back in. Maybe they can bring the great Apple minds together to make my iPhone stop blasting an alarm in my ear at regular volume if I happen to be talking on the phone when it goes off (issue since my very first iPhone 3).

> iPhone [...] blasting an alarm in my ear at regular volume if I happen to be talking on the phone when [the alarm] goes off

This always gets me...is there not a public bug report for this one?

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