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Comment by jurgenaut23 | Hacker News Reader

It doesn’t matter. No one buys an iPhone for Siri and no one switches to Android for whatever they call this thing. I have owned an iPhone for more than 15 years, and I have used Siri a dozen times.

They will implement something using GPT-4 or Claude and this whole mess will be forgotten.

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I would. Hands free in the car or when mowing the grass, chatting with the AI would be huge.

"Text my wife and say I'll be late." is still too much to ask: it responds with 20 questions about all the parameters.

"turn up the volume" does actually work for the first time, lately. (Bravo, Android).

"open app antenna pod and begin playing" is way out of the question. Suck.

If you rename your wife on your contact list to "my wife" it'll work!

"Test <name> and say I'll be late" works fine. Sometimes the message gets sent, sometimes a request for confirmation is asked first. Irritating it isn't consistent.

> "open app antenna pod and begin playing"

This should work with the old Google assistant even, assuming the app added the proper integrations.

Yeah the whole point of ML is it learns without needing an integration. "Open app X" is something a 5 year old can do (and Gemini can actually do this). But "open X and play" it gets tripped up on the media play state. That 5 year old would just look for a play button. Or if it's a bluetooth enabled app it will have an API to play. There's still a gap.

Or how about at least having a full understanding or how iOS and it settings work things like “hey Siri turn off the phone” or “ hey Siri, why am I not hearing a ring when I get phone calls?” or “why is my phone not going into silent mode when I get into bed at night”.

Funny enough, this was in their Apple Intelligence demo. I'm not sure whether this actually shipped.

Young people are increasingly comfortable using voice, and marketing agencies already consider Gen Alpha to be “voice native.” I once saw a small child help his grandfather with a phone issue. The grandfather fumbled with the GUI, but the child opened Siri and solved it by voice. If Apple drops the ball on voice, it may not hurt them today - but they risk losing the next decade.

> Young people are increasingly comfortable using voice

I know plenty of folks in their 40s and 50s who have used Siri as their primary way to search the internet for years.

My mom does everything through voice on her iPhone. My son defaults to using Siri on Mac for a ton of things. He grew up with an Alexa. It's really the in between generation who learned how to master a computer at a young age that don't really use it.

My in-laws use Siri/voice interactions almost exclusively, dictating text messages out-loud, searching for shows on Roku using the voice remote, etc.

Even my 2.5 year old will ask Alexa and Siri to do things, sometimes far away from any device that could respond.

I use Siri a lot for home automation, and am frustrated by how much better it could be.

"Turn off all the lights in the house" works, but "turn off all the lights" does not. What?!??

I do think Apple needs a better Siri, but I think ultimately they were smart not to plow tons of money into it trying to do it themselves.

A better Siri is an expense to keep up the premium brand, not something that they will monetize. For particular uses of AI people will just want particular apps.

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