John Giannandrea to retire from Apple | Hacker News Reader

John Giannandrea to retire from Apple

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Additional reporting: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/12/01/apple-ai-chief-retiring...

Siri is probably among the products which had the most exposure to users (probably a billion+ users throughout iPhone's history) without capturing that opportunity to actually do anything meaningful with the huge user base it got for free.

A decade and a half is insane timeline in tech industry, and huge majority of users use Siri the same way today as 15 years ago, setting a timer or an alarm clock.

If they had 0 improvements over these 15 years the situation wouldn't be much different than today.

I'd throw in the failure to do anything meaningful with home automation, which I guess could fall under the Siri umbrella of failure. Maybe I'm still peeved big tech bought up the industry just to kill any innovation.

Hey, my 10 HomePods are able to turn off 80% of my lights at night, 80% of the time!

I've switched to Home Assistant, and it's sooo much better.

Home Assistant can even share devices with Home app, so you can still use "Siri, turn off the lamp" to have it answer "you don't have any alarms set".

I'm amazed 'set a reminder for x when I leave this location' still doesn't get the 'when I leave this location'. It's clear user expectation created internally (by siri marketing) and externally (by ai tools) has far outpaced capability.

Apple seems weird about that and I'm not sure why, maybe accuracy or creepiness factor?

A feature I would love is to toggle "answer calls on speakerphone" based on location, so that I can answer a call with my phone on the desk while I'm at home and not have my ear blasted off taking a call when I'm walking down the street.

I can set location-based alerts manually. For me, or for those who voluntarily already share their location with me. No reason Siri can’t drive those same notifications.

Edit: to be clear, Siri doesn’t. Still no reason it shouldn’t be able to.

Apple Reminders has a feature to remind you when you are leaving or arriving at a location. It's super useful! But it's not super low friction to add to a Reminder via UI (it's buried at the bottom of the edit screen), so it's a feature ideally suited for a voice-based reminder. Nevertheless, nobody implemented it.

Hey, I made that!

It's a great feature! I was demoing it to my parents over Thanksgiving and forgot about the lack of Siri support, and of course it failed. Parents were excited when I mentioned it but now won't be using it. Ah well.

Super useful feature; thanks. I used it to help me remember the names of people I saw often at places I ate at or worked out of.

hey, the most reliable way to send something to yourself is still via email. if it works it works.

Yep. It was theirs to lose… and they lost it.

Siri is really a pretty useless product. Its annoying that sometimes I can say “siri is x y” and it will answer me but other times it will respond “sorry I cant google this while youre driving” or whatever response. I see no reason I cant say “siri read me the wikipedia page on the thirty years war”. Why cant I query with siri? “Siri where is the closest gas station coming up?” I basically only want siri whilst driving and half the features are turned off then.

Asking “what’s the weather” in the morning gets Siri to yell at you about the phone being locked, or even “I don’t know where you are”.

It’s such trash. Constant conditioning for garbage.

Timers and alarm clocks it is.

"What's the weather in Berlin." "you need to unlock your phone to activate location service services"

Works for me. Turn on "allow Siri when locked"?

If it doesn't know where you are then you might live in a Faraday cage.

Their point is that Siri is not consistent with these things. If you've never had these issues yourself then good for you, not everyone is as lucky.

I have had the same issues myself. The "allow Siri when locked" toggle for my phone is set to on, yet it still often refuses to do stuff like turning my home lights on/off, giving the reason that I need to unlock my phone.

And I've also had the location issue they gave an example of, where asking "what is the weather in Berlin" does not need it to know where you are because you've told it the location you're asking about, so the answer is the same regardless of whether you're asking while in Berlin or Tokyo, yet it still sometimes gets stuck believing it needs location access.

Edit: oops the issue of having said a location in the request wasn't in the comment you replied to, but another reply to it. But the overall point of Siri being annoyingly inconsistent still stands.

You would think it's the opposite. "I'll tell you where the gas station is because it's preferable to you looking at a screen in your death can"

My favorite is when you have Siri off but CarPlay on. You can be actively navigating, but say “find me the nearest X” and it’ll say “I’m sorry, I don’t know where you are”

Yeah there should just be a global option when you're settling up the phone called "I want my shit to work and don't care that Apple has my location", and then allow all the relevant apps location access, rather than the piecemeal per-apple-app setting. I mean, as a developer I can understand the difference between the weather app always having my location and apple maps only having my location when open, but what the hell Apple? Just have a button for "make it work" vs "I'm paranoid", and let the paranoid micromanage to their hearts desire. (Not pejoratively, other people have a different threat model from me. I know people who have legitimate reason for enabling lockdown mode.)

Eeeh ... the gap between "full access for all apps" and "lockdown mode" is wide.

Casuals are in there--nontechnical folks for whom "brick breaker deluxe wants to access your contacts" might raise an eyebrow. The stalked are in there--malicious apps that track location of the install-ee are unfortunately not uncommon. The one-device-for-multiple-lives folks are in there (if your work email/contacts are on your phone, it's a good thing that your dating app has to ask permission before acquiring your phone's contacts). So are the forgetful--that periodic "hey, this app has had permissions for ages, do you still want it to have that access?" thing not only helps folks clean up their perms, it reminds lots of folks about services they forgot they paid (or worse, forgot they are still paying) for.

I read it as they meant all Apple apps, not all apps.

Or if these chat apps could hold a conversation as basic as "I don't know where you are, would you allow me access to your gps?"

Siri was also completely miscommunicated from the beginning. I could never get Siri to do what I wanted, because I didn't realize that it had a very strict and narrow menu, but it never communicated what that menu was, and had no way of saying "here are the 5 things you can tell me about." And then there were the network communication issues where you don't know why you're not getting a response, or if Siri is going to work at all.

Every few years I would try to use it for a few days, then quit in frustration at how useless it was. Accidentally activating Siri is a major frustration point of using Apple products for me.

Yeah, it's a classic CLI v GUI blunder. If you don't know exactly what the commands are, the interface is not going to be particularly usable.

I've found I appreciate having Siri for a few things, but it's not good enough to make it something I reach for frequently. Once burned, twice shy.

I get this pain with Apple in a bunch of different areas. The things they do well, they do better than anyone, but part of the design language is to never admit defeat so very few of the interfaces will ever show you an error message of any kind. The silent failure modes everywhere gets really frustrating.

I’m looking at you, Photos sync.

EDIT: just noticed this exact problem is on the front page in its own right (https://eclecticlight.co/2025/11/30/last-week-on-my-mac-losi...)

Photos is horrific for this. No progress, no indicators. And what little status you get has no connection to reality.

Will it sync? When? Who knows? You’re on WiFi with a full battery and charging? So? Might be a minute, might be an hour. Oh, you restarted Photos? Who cares? Not Photos.

Agree that new Photos is abysmal compared to what it was before. And that's before the macOS only features that you don't know are macOS only features (like naming photos! Seriously!)

There's a lot of arcane lore about how to get it to sync. Closing all applications, restarting, then starting photos, then hiding the photos main window, then waiting, was how I got it to work last time. It worked twice, YMMV. If there's a cli alternative, please tell me.

You're not saying it, but ugh, yeah, anything along those lines of magic incantations and this is all the very antithesis of what Apple claims to embody.

> The silent failure modes everywhere gets really frustrating.

I literally just experienced this with RCS failing to activate. No failure message, dug into logs, says userinteractionrequired. Front page of HN, nobody knows, apple corp response, 'thats interesting no you cant talk to engineering'.

Read the RCS spec definition document to fall asleep to after the board swap and the call saying they won't work on it since issue resolved, answers exactly what that meant, Apple never implemented handling for it, my followup post: https://wt.gd/working-rcs-messaging

I don't even use Photos, except in extreme situation. It was such a major UX downgrade from iPhoto that I could never get it to work without lots of mystery meat guessing, and every interaction with it was so unpleasant because of that.

Knowing that a company had competent product designers that made a good product, but then shitcanned the working product for a bunch of amateur output from people that don't understand dry very basics of UI, from the one company that made good UI its primary feature for decades... well it just felt like full on betrayal. The same thing happened with absolutely shitty Apple Music, which I never, ever use, because it's so painful to remember what could have been with iTunes...

My biggest pet peeve with macOS Music is that you can't go back a track in the "infinite play" mode. Not only can you not go back to the previous track, but you can't even go back to the beginning of the song - the button is just greyed out. It's a purely arbitrary limitation because the same functionality works fine in iOS.

I don't know why it bugs me so much, but I'm at the point of moving my library into a self-hosted Navidrome instance so I can stop using Music.

Just think that they marketed Photos as a worthwhile replacement for Aperture as well.

I remember advising many photographs friends on using Aperture for photo library management. Now I feel so bad for ever recommending that. I mean Lightroom now has a stupid subscription, but using Apple software was kind of the point: avoiding the risk of software becoming too expensive or bad because the hardware premium funds the development of good software.

Now you get to pay more for the hardware but you have to deal with shitty or expensive software as well. Makes no sense.

Bingo. My wife’s phone failed to backup to iCloud. To be fair, there’s an error message. However, the list of what takes up space does not show what’s actually taking up space. Such as videos texted to or from you (can easily be multiple gigs as they add up over a year or two)

The list didn’t show the god damn GoPro app, which was taking up 20GB of space from downloaded videos. I guessed it was the problem because it showed up in the device storage list, but literally not reported when you look at the list of data to backup.

iMessage is another great example of a failure. I changed my iMessage email and didn’t receive messages in a family group chat until I noticed — I had to text the chat before stuff started coning through. Previously sent messages were never delivered. And they all have my phone number, which has been my primary iMessage for LITERALLY over a decade. iMessage’s identity system is seriously messed up on a fundamental level. (I’ve had numerous other issues with it, but I’ll digress.)

It’s messed up, but it can be fixed by turning off iMessage and MMS in settings.app and then turning it back on. It’s an old bug. Since it hasn’t been fixed, I’m guessing the solution introduces more problems than it a solves for whatever reason.

Ironically this manages to break all four of Apple's famous UI principles from Bruce Tognazzini: discoverability, transparency, feedback and recovery

This is just the conversational interface issue. You need the system to be able to do most of the things you would expect a human to be able to do (e.g. if you're talking to your phone, you'd expect it to be able to do most phone things). If the conversational system can only do a small subset of those, then it just becomes a game of "discover the magical incantation that will be in the set of possibilities", and becomes an exercise in frustration.

This is why LLMs are the first conversational interface to actually have a chance of working, once you give them enough tools.

> once you give them enough tools

are there solutions to the error rates when picking from dozens or even hundreds of tools i'm not aware of?

Yes, there are a few. Anthropic released one just last week.

Any hints on how it works? Or is it unscrutainizable secret sauce?

https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/advanced-tool-use

In game design we used to call this opacity “hunt the verb” in text adventures.

All chat bots suffer this flaw.

GUIs solve it.

CLIs could be said to have it, but there is no invitation to guess, and no one pretends you don’t need the manual.

For CLIs - most reasonable commands either have a `-h`, `--help`, `-help`, `/?`, or what have you. And manpages exist. Hunt the verb isn't really a problem for CLIs.

And furthermore - aren't there shells that will give you the --help if you try to tab-complete certain commands? Obviously there's the issue of a lack of standardization for how command-line switches work, but broadly speaking it's not difficult to have a list of common (or even uncommon) commands and how their args work.

(spends a few minutes researching...)

This project evidently exists, and I think it's even fairly well supported in e.g. Debian-based systems: https://github.com/scop/bash-completion.

> For CLIs - most reasonable commands either have a `-h`, `--help`, `-help`, `/?`, or what have you. And manpages exist. Hunt the verb isn't really a problem for CLIs.

"Hunt the verb" means that the user doesn't know which commands (verbs) exist. Which a neophyte at a blank console will not. This absolutely is a problem with CLIs.

Discoverability is quite literally the textbook problem with CLIs, in that many textbooks on UI & human factors research over the last 50 years discuss the problem.

Per the thread OP, nobody pretends that CLIs do not need a manual.

Many users like myself enjoy a good manual and will lean into a CLI at every opportunity. This is absolutely counter to the value proposition of a natural language assistant.

I think this is a naming problem. CLI is usually the name for the interface to an application. A Shell is the interface to the OS. Nonetheless agree with your post but this might be part of the difficulty in the discussion

Wow, I now feel old.

To be super pedantic, wouldn’t the interface to a shell itself be a Command Line Interface? ;)

that’s the ambiguity that I think is tripping the discussion up a little. Also the idea of a CLI/Shell/Terminal is also quite coupled to a system, rather than services. Hence the whole ‘web service’ hope to normalise remote APIs that if you squint hard enough become ‘curl’ on the command line

But the point is none of that is intrinsic or interesting to the underlying idea, it’s just of annoying practical relevance to interfacing with APIs today

Yes. But I think the point is a good one. With CLI there is a recognition that there must be a method of learning what the verbs are. And there are many traditions which give us expectations and defaults. That doesn’t exist in the chat format.

Every time I try to interact with one of these llm gatekeepers I just say what I want and hope it figures out to send me to a person. The rest of the time I’m trying to convince the Taco Bell to record a customer complaint about how its existence itself is dystopian.

"Hunt the verb" can be alleviated to some degree for programs that require parameters by just showing the manpage when invalid or missing parameters are specified. It's highly frustrating when programs require you to go through every possible help parameter until you get lucky.

the comment you're replying to said:

> but there is no invitation to guess, and no one pretends you don’t need the manual

which is basically what you're saying too? the problem with voice UIs and some LLM tools is that it's unclear which options and tools exist and there's no documentation of it.

Siri does have documentation: https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/iphone/ipha48873ed6/io.... This list (recursively) contains more things than probably 95% of users ever do with Siri. The problem really boils down to the fact that a CLI is imposing enough that someone will need a manual (or a teacher), whereas a natural language interface looks like it should support "basically any query" but in practice does not (and cannot) due to fundamental limitations. Those limitations are not obvious, especially to lay users, making it impossible in practice to know what can and cannot be done.

Well that's largely theoretical and Siri needs largely more input than is worth the trouble. It lacks context and because of Apple focus on privacy/security is largely unable to learn who you are to be able to do stuff depending on what it knows about you.

If you ask Siri about playing some music, it will go the dumb route of finding the tracks that seems to be a close linguistic match of what you said (if it correctly understood you in the first place) when in fact you may have meant another track of the same name. Which means you always need to overspecify with lots of details (like the artist and album) and that defeat the purpose of having an "assistant".

Another example would be asking it to call your father, which it will fail to do so unless you have correctly filled the contact card with a relation field linked to you. So you need to fill in all the details about everyone (and remember what name/details you used), otherwise you are stuck just relying on rigid naming like a phone book. Moderately useful and since it require upfront work the payoff potential isn't very good. If Siri would be able to figure out who's who just from the communications happening on your device, it could be better, but Apple has dug itself into a hole with their privacy marketing.

The whole point of an (human) assistant is that it knows you, your behaviors, how you think, what you like. So he/she can help you with less effort on your part because you don't have to overspecify every details that would be obvious to you and anyone who knows you well enough. Siri is hopeless because it doesn't really know you, it only use some very simple heuristic to try to be useful. One example is how it always offer to give me the route home when I turn on the car, even when I'm only running errands and the next stop is just another shop. It is not only unhelpful but annoying because giving me the route home when I'm only a few kilometers away is not particularly useful in the first place.

> And manpages exist.

For older tools, sure. Newer tools eschew man pages and just offer some help flag, even though there are excellent libraries that generate manpages like https://crates.io/crates/clap_mangen or https://crates.io/crates/mandown (for Rust, but I am sure most languages have one) without requiring you to learn troff.

Newer in maturity though, I'd say, no not like 'modern' tools vs. only vintage tools have them. It's just not something people tend to consider early on I think, but popular stuff gets there. (For one thing, at some point someone points it out in the issue tracker!)

All of this is true. “Invitation to guess” is the key phrase in my comment. CLIs present as cryptic, which is a UX _advantage_ over chat wrappers because the implied call to action is “go do some reading before you touch this”.

An AI wrapper typically has few actual capabilities, concealed behind a skeuomorphic “fake person” UX. It may have a private list of capabilities but it otherwise doesn’t know if it knows something or not and will just say stuff.

It really needs to be 100% before it’s useful and not just frustrating.

That's explain why there is a limited set of recommended verbs in PowerShell.

Instead, you get to hunt the nouns.

Very well written, I'm wondering when current "cli haxxxor assistant" FAD will fade away and focus will move into proper, well thought out and adjusted to changed paradigm IDEs instead of wasting resources. Well, maybe not completely wasting as this is probably still part of discovery process.

CLI + small LLM (I am aware of the oxymoron) trained on docs could be fun

If you like deleting all your files, sure. LLMs, especially small ones, have far too high a propensity for consequential mistakes to risk them on something like that.

I was thinking more in context of interactive help that will just find and display relevant manual info (to get around the problem of "it remembered wrong") rather than vibe coder favourite of "just run what you hallucinated immediately"

A lot of AI models also suffer this flaw.

The lack of an advertised set of capabilities is intentional so that data can be gathered on what users want the system to do (even if it can't). Unfortunately, this is a terrible experience for the user as they are frustrated over and over again.

Given that they made no apparent use of such information in practice, the unfortunate thing is that they had the idea to begin with.

This is a problem all over our industry:

- almost every search field (when an end user modifies the search instead of clicking one of the results for the second time that should be a clear signal that something is off.)

- almost every chat bot (Don't even get me started about the Fisher Price toy level of interactions provided by most of them. And worse: I know they can be great, one company I interact with now has a great one and a previous company I worked for had another great one. It just seems people throw chatbots at the page like it is a checkbox that needs to be checked.)

- almost all server logs (what pages are people linking to that now return 404?)

- referer headers (you product is being discussed in an open forum and no one cares to even read it?)

We collect so much data and then we don't use it for anything that could actually delight our users. Either it is thrown away or worse it is fed back into "targeted" advertising that besides being an ugly idea also seems to be a stupid idea in many cases: years go by betweeen each time I see a "targeted" ad that actually makes me want to buy something, much less actually buy something.

It's called discoverability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discoverability

>GUIs solve it.

Very charitable, but rarely true.

I didn’t know for years that you can ask it to do things remotely over SSH.

Can you explain?

You can run shortcuts using Siri. You can create a shortcut with an action that executes via SSH: https://matsbauer.medium.com/how-to-run-ssh-terminal-command....

Siri does have a "Ask me some things I can do" feature, but the problem is it's way too big; most of the things are things I don't care about ("Ask me for a joke", "Ask me who won the Superbowl last night"); and a lot of times even forx things I can do, its comprehension is just poor. "Hey Siri, play me Ein Klein Nachtmusik by Mozart". "OK, here's Gonna Pump Big by Diddy Q[1]". "Hey Siri, tell Paul I'm on my way". "OK, calling Mike smith".

[1] Made up title

Google Now. It's even completely gone and forgotten.

Oh the things they could have done with Google Now. I want to know the story behind it's death if any insiders are lurking around.

Ugh Google Now on my Pixel 3 was the last time I felt a genuine "wow" factor with tech. Everything since then has been between eye-rolling, uninteresting, or just worse.

Honestly, my experience with Siri is that it works worse than it did 10 years ago. It's not clear to me if that's with Siri itself or just the general decrease in quality of Apple software over the past N years, but zero changes would have been an improvement.

Things that seemed to work reliably for me 10 years ago but now do not:

1. "Call mom". Siri has apparently forgotten who my mother is. I tried "Hey Siri <name> is my mother" and I got an error. I'm sure it's resolvable but come on.

2. "Directions to <destination>" This always used to fail when it couldn't find places, but lately, when I'm driving, Siri will respond "Getting directions to <destination>" and then... nothing. No directions come up. I have to do it 2-3 times to have the directions actually start.

I back this, it used to work very well for me. Timers, music, etc. Now it's like I'm trying to ask a toddler.

Hey I tried to use Siri to call my mom ~half a week ago and it said it didn't know who my mother was. I did find it weird since although I don't use Siri much, I was almost certain I've had success with that exact same request before, and haven't changed my contacts recently.

Interesting that you've also had that problem.

Yeah I've been having this with directions for a while too. It generally takes on the second try but a good 30% of the time I'm getting the same acknowledgement it's getting directions and then just silently failing.

I would love to know why Siri has clearly deteriorated. I assume it’s opaquely failing due to server infrastructure not keeping up. Thought device-side was supposed to help with that. That’s another thing I’d like to understand — what are the moving parts to Siri?

I have experienced some similar issues. I think some of it related to the "locked" state of the device. Siri needs context data to answer, particularly the mom or some destination questions. Specifically for contacts or recent places data. This context isn't remotely stored, but provided by the device to Siri each time. I think when the phone is locked it doesn't have access to the data (reading or writing). When I mean "Siri", I mean both the on device and remote parts of it.

I think this also interacts with countries and states that have (possibly misguided) strict laws forbidding the "touching" of phones "while driving". My experiences suggest that using Siri when driving and the device is locked, it just gives up - I sort of see the start of it working then, bam, it stops. If I retry, I suspect that I've somehow "looked" at the phone in frustration, it saw my attention and unlocked. I now wonder if where I have placed the device is making a difference.

It does seem to work much better (when driving) if the device is already unlocked.

I also see odd things when using Shortcuts for navigation. If I've previously asked for walking directions and then speak the shortcut while driving it won't give directions until I switch to the "car" icon in maps. I think it might be trying to calculate the 15Km walking directions, but it doesn't complete before I tell it, frustrated, to stop.

When Siri doesn't work it is usually the times when I need it to. This is definitely a multiplier in disastisfaction.

After writing this I decided to look at my shortcut. The action seems to have been a simple "get directions to <place>" and sent verbatim to Siri.

I was not able to edit / update it! However, there was now a new "maps" option for `Open <type> directions from <Start> to <Destination>`

Where type can now be {driving,walking,biking,transit} and <start> is Current Location by default.

After updating, this now seems to correctly set actual driving directions, even if I'd previously set up a walking route!

The competition has suffered too. The companies seem to have collectively written the category off.

I remembered a third one:

3. It won't reliably play music anymore! I have a good set of songs in my iPhone's Apple Music library. When I say "Hey siri, play <song/artists>", it asks me for access to Pandora (which I do have on my phone). I don't want to play it on Pandora. I have the song! I have just spent the last 10 minutes trying to figure out how to change this, and neither the youtube video I found searching nor this reddit thread (https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/y18ioq/changing_the_de...) seems to work.

Amusingly (?) the reddit people have the opposite problem. They want to use a 3rd party music app but can't get their phones to stop preferring Apple-provided apps.

I can sometimes get this to work by saying "Play <song/artist> on Apple Music", but even that is not reliable.

It's actually crazy how they've seemingly managed to do absolutely nothing with Siri in a decade and a half. I legitimately have no idea what features it has had added, but I still try basic things and am shocked at how useless it is.

I was excited when I recently got an iPhone 16 Pro - it comes with Apple Intelligence! Surely this is how Siri leaps into the future and starts doing things like translating for me, or responding with a photo and some basic facts when I ask who Ariana Greenblatt is, or letting me convert from Krore to USD (it gives results for rupees every time it seems?) or...

Anyways, I asked it something basic, and Siri said it would have to use Apple Intelligence. Not like, prompting me if I want to use it, just saying it's needed, then turning off. I'm pretty confused as to what Apple Intelligence is at this point, since I assumed it would be Siri. "Hey Apple Intelligence" doesn't do anything, so I ask ChatGPT. It informs me that AI is, in fact, part of Siri. I... do not know why it gave me that response.

Back to timers and alarms.

Edit - this is your daily reminder that you can NO LONGER SHUT OFF IPHONES BY HOLDING DOWN THE POWER BUTTON.

Siri has changed once it its (her?) lifetime.

When they introduced "machine learning" it started working much worse - things that used to work 99% of the time (if you knew the incantation) now randomly fail in inexplicable ways.

And now it never gets my kids' names right. If I'm doing voice-to-text I will actually see it flash the correct spelling, and then replace it with some random phrase.

Uses for Siri:

1. Checking the current temp or weather

2. Setting an alarm, timer, or reminder

3. Skipping a music track or stopping the music altogether roughly 3 seconds after hearing the command, or 1 second after you assume it didn't work

Telling it to find directions in CarPlay but you have to say “using Google Maps” at the end. It’s pretty good for finding directions with voice only.

It is ridiculously useless for most things though. Like I’ll ask it a question on my Apple Watch and it will do a web search and give me a bunch of useless links.

the thing I find most frustrating about the music use-case is that if you ask it to play an album, then close out Siri after the confirmation bing noise, but before it finishes reading back to you the artist and album name it's about to play, then it will treat that as a cancellation and it won't play the album.

for example I say: "play comically long album title by artist on Spotify", it thinks about that for five seconds, does the bing noise, then says "playing comically long album title [special remastered edition] by artist on Spotify", and then a few seconds later starts playing the album, and if you don't wait through that whole thing it will just decide that actually you didn't want to hear the album

For some reason this confirmation is always much louder than the music you are listening to.

If you tell Siri to play some obscure artist or title of which there seem to be about 10 possible hits, then sure, we need confirmation. If I tell you to play Riders on the Storm by the The Doors, just play it damn it.

Directions when I’m in the car.

Tell me my next event when I’m driving.

The one God-damn thing I really liked using it for, "skip to next chapter" in CarPlay podcasts, they REMOVED.

> A decade and a half is insane timeline in tech industry, and huge majority of users use Siri the same way today as 15 years ago, setting a timer or an alarm clock.

When it works!

I’ve spend days where it goes wonky and says something went wrong for anything I ask. How is it that with modern phones the voice recognition and whatnot isn’t running locally?

Alexa is in the same boat. Compared to old-fashioned finger-and-screen interfaces, maybe voice simply isn't a great way to interact with computers in the general case. It's inconvenient, unreliable, and even if it works quite slow. Yet you see companies continue to chase the dream in the current generative AI craze.

I get the sci-fi "wow" appeal, but even the folks who tried to build Minority Report-style 3D interfaces gave up after realizing tired arms make for annoyed users.

> voice simply isn't a great way to interact with computers in the general case

You know I have talked to chatGPT for maybe a 100 hours over the past 6 months. It gets my accent, it switches languages, it humors. It understands what I am saying even if it hallucinates once in a while.

If you can have chatGPT level of comprehension, you can do a lot with computers. Maybe not vim level of editing, but every single function in a driving car should be controllable by voice, and so could a lot of phone and computer functions.

Why on earth would you want to accelerate, brake, and steer by voice?

I'm assuming they meant things like "change temperature" or "seat massage" or "play Despacito" - things you might need to look for in a rental car

Or more helpfully “find me a fuel station near my destination”

Step on it Jeeves, and go through the park.

You'd better hope Jeeves doesn't use MapQuest or you might have to drive through a river before you get to the park!

"Car, turn right. Shit, no left, left!" slams into wall

I think the utility of voice commands is marginal at best in a car. In isolation, voice commands don't make sense if you have passengers. You basically have to tell everyone to shut up to ensure the car understands your commands over any ongoing conversation. And in the context of old fashioned knobs and buttons, voice is seriously a lot of complex engineering to solve problems that have long been non-issues.

Not to mention the likely need for continuous internet connectivity and service upkeep. Car companies aren't exactly known for good software governance.

> Not to mention the likely need for continuous internet connectivity and service upkeep. Car companies aren't exactly known for good software governance.

I don't own a car but rent them occasionally on vacation in every one I've rented that I can remember since they started having the big touch screens that connect with your phone, the voice button on the steering wheel would just launch Siri (on CarPlay), which seems optimal—just have the phone software deal with it because the car companies are bad at software.

It seems to work fine for changing music when there's no passenger to do that, subject to only the usual limitations with Siri sucking—but I don't expect a car company to do better, and honestly the worst case I've can remember with music is that played the title track of an album rather than the album, which is admittedly ambiguous. Now I just say explicitly "play the album 'foo' by 'bar' on Spotify" and it works. It's definitely a lot safer than fumbling around with the touchscreen (and Spotify's CarPlay app is very limited for browsing anyways, for safety I assume but then my partner can't browse music either, which would be fine) or trying to juggle CDs back in the day.

Modern cars have several microphones or directional microphones and can isolate a speaker.

I think well-done voice commands are a great addition to a car, especially for rentals. When figuring out how to do something in a new car, I have to choose between safety, interruption (stopping briefly) or not having my desires function change.

Most basic functions can be voice-controlled without Internet connectivity. You should only need that for conversational topics, not for controlling car functions.

How I miss old fashioned knobs and buttons. The utility of voice commands goes up when all your HVAC controls and heated car elements are only accessible on a touchscreen that you can’t use with the mitts you need to wear when it’s cold.

Again, I disagree. I almost entirely use Siri to get directions to places using Google maps with my voice when I’m on CarPlay. I also use Siri to respond to texts in my car, not as frequently but often enough.

Alexa has gotten significantly worse with the "Alexa+" AI updates. I used to be able to say stuff like "Alexa, set the lights to 5" and it would turn the lights to 5% in the room I was currently in. Now half the time it tries to start a conversation about the number 5, or the northern lights, or other random nonsense. Absolute garbage.

It's great interface when your hands are doing something else so I do see the appeal.

Just that... nobody is willing to pay much for a thing that will do some basic search, dictate a recipe, or do unit conversion, or add a thing to a list.

Alexa has this annoying habit of being non-deterministic.

> Alexa, turn on the bedroom lights.

> OK lights turn on

In the evening:

> Alexa, turn on the bedroom lights.

> I'm sorry, I don't know a device called "bedroom lights".

How is it even possible to build a computer system that behaves like this?

OMG yes this! It’s infuriating.

Even basic tasks like “play this song” get screwed up and wonder off into the abyss. Absolute pile of garbage from Amazon on this AI stuff.

Internal timeouts on backend calls, eventual consistency...

Strong disagree. I would say 90% of the text I “write” on my phone is speech to text. I wouldn’t use ChatGPT nearly as much if I had to type out paragraph prompts every single time.

Maybe it’s just my imagination, but it seems like text to speech in the ChatGPT prompt window uses the context around it in the paragraph to fix what I’m saying so it is inordinately accurate compared to the rest of the iOS system.

I know, it's lame. Over that amount of time Apple with the help of third party developers could have walked much of useful distance we now are trying to run to with LLMs for controlling devices. Unfortunately Apple neither wanted to give up the interaction point to developers nor develop it themselves, and only gave users some control super late with Shortcuts.

I used it exactly so (timers and alarm clocks) until after some updates it wouldn’t react to my voice even half the time. I haven’t tried it since in 10 years.

It’s got worse in the past few years, I think thought they might have impeded it so that the waited for improvements were that much more apparent.

Does anyone have an actual technical theory of how it’s possible for commands that used to work , say a month ago, to just stop working?

What is it about Siri’s architecture that causes “Set bedroom light to 30%”, a command that worked for years, to randomly stops working on a random Tuesday with no OS update or home change?

I mean, what on earth are they doing on the back end…?

For me, the standout was a period of 6 months or so when Siri stopped understanding the world "half" (as in "lights to half"), and thne it abruptly started working again.

My hypothesis is that when Siri does processing on the phone its abilities are severely diminished. Perhaps there is some heuristic it uses to pick if it processes voice to text on the phone vs on the server (e.g. possibly based on server load). That might be why you see inconsistencies day to day.

The tension is that there's a big chasm of utility from those things until you're compete-with-Google-Search levels of good. I feel like I heard there was an Amazon UX study that said weather, music, and alarms/timers are all people use Alexa for. And even with the best LLM, that's probably all you want out of a smart speaker.

A whole bunch of assistants have gotten way worse in the last decade by chasing features at the expense of utility. I don't care about whatever new feature my speaker has, but if it fails to play a song or check the weather, I'm PISSED.

My original HomePod has recently regressed in its ability to play songs. It can no longer play one song after another without glitching and repeating a little bit of the previous song. It boggles my mind.

Steve Jobs passed away the day after Siri’s release, and I don’t think anyone else had the confidence and internal credibility to push the hard organizational changes Siri needed, similar to when he moved Apple to a single P&L when he returned.

Until LLMs came along, there wasn’t much you could do to improve Siri’s underlying technology. You could throw a thousand monkeys at to add more phrases it could match on and improve the interface to let you know what you could do. But that’s about it.

LLMs would help a lot, but there was a lot of low hanging fruit. During my time at Apple I worked on some of the evaluation of Siri's quality and saw first hand how the org issues affected Siri's path forward.

Now I’m curious. What could have been improved about Siri other than “bringing in 1000 monkeys” to add more phrases for intent matching before LLMs?

Good question. While I had a fairly narrow view of a very large system, I'll give my personal perspective.

I worked on systems for evaluating the quality of models over time and for evaluating the quality of new models before release to understand how the new models would perform compared to current models once in the wild. It was difficult to get Siri to use these tools that were outside of their org. While this wouldn't solve the breadth of Siri's functionality issues, it would have helped improve the overall user experience with the existing Siri features to avoid the seemingly reduction of quality over time.

Secondly, and admittedly farther from where I was... Apple could have started the move from ML models to LLMs much sooner. The underlying technology for LLMs started gaining popularity in papers and research quite a few years ago, and there was a real problem of each team developing their own ML models for search, similarity, recommendations, etc that were quite large and that became a problem for mobile device delivery and storage. If leadership had a way to bring the orgs together they may have landed on LLMs much sooner.

Despite my positive experience between building systems based on intent recognition and how much better LLMs are than “1000 monkeys”, it seems like the two examples we have of LLM backed assistants - Google and Amazon - that it made them worse from reports.

I don’t know why that is from a technical level.

If someone has the resources to do this, it is Apple. For a product that can be used by billions of people, having an engineer dedicated to a single intent wouldn't be that wasteful :D

> A decade and a half is insane timeline in tech industry, and huge majority of users use Siri the same way today as 15 years ago, setting a timer or an alarm clock.

Also quite good for making shopping lists, with some bonus amusement when you get a weird transcription and have to try to work out that "cats and soup" is "tonkatsu sauce" several days after you added it to the list.

Because almost no one (outside of accessibility needs) truly needs or wants to use voice to control their device. It’s one of the few UX fetishes that refuses to die.

People really thought Siri was what LLM chat bots are today.

Voice Assistance was a thing long before Siri, and was arguably more useful because it was less smart, the keywords worked more predictably.

It also pioneered billions of other users with "hey google" and "siri" uselessness which also copied and then completely flatlined with things to do beyond calling the wrong person in your call list, setting timers, and playing the wrong song.

Siri isn’t the only one.. Amazon has the same story with Alexa, but they did get to Alexa+ before Siri’s successor bowed.

So now can we all agree that voice interfaces are mostly useless? Other than "Siri, set a timer for ten minutes" while your hands are full in the kitchen. Siri could never work because voice interfaces are not good.

if anything, siri has gotten worse over the years, which is wild.

it used to be able to set a timer or alarm 100% of the time, now sometimes it decides it needs to ask chatGPT for help.

The problem was that Siri didn’t need new technology to be at least as good as Alexa, just more monkeys at the keyboard.

Classic Alexa, Gemini and Siri are all just intent based pattern matching systems where you brute force all of the phrases you want to match on (utterances), map those to intents and have “slots” for the variable parts. Like where you are coming from and where you are going.

Then you trigger an API. I’ve worked with the underlying technology behind Alexa for years on AWS - Amazon Lex - with call centers (Amazon Connect).

On the other hand, the capabilities and reliability of both Alexa and Google’s voice assistant have regressed once they moved to an LLM based system. It seems to be a hard problem and I don’t understand why.

I’ve find plenty of free text input -> LLM -> standard JSON output -> call API implementations. It seems like it would just be another LLM + brute force issue.

"15 years ago" is funny, because Siri couldn't even do either of those functions on desktop 7 years ago [1]. It's crazy how they've managed to do nothing with a winning hand.

[1] https://reddit.com/r/apple/comments/9q7ugf/it_is_truly_absur...

It's actually worse than that because Siri was MORE functional back when it had static NLP rules. Many people have used it to book movie tickets, restaurant reservations, etc. it also told pretty funny jokes. I definitely remember people having a great time with that feature.

It was never a good idea for a product.

I'm not ever going to talk to my phone. Certainly not for the slim list of things that doing so would make more efficient than just looking at it and poking the button I need.

And there's no way I'm going to enable a battery draining 24/7 surveillance microphone on my phone on the off chance I ever do come up with a reason to give it a voice command.

But Apple really wants me using it. So much that my wife's car won't enable CarPlay unless turn Siri on. Like, there's no way to get it to put a Google map on the car's screen unless I turn this unrelated other thing on. They're happy to burn all our goodwill and convince us to buy Android phones next time (which work fine in a car without their surveillance microphone turned on).

Until then, I bought a $5 phone stand for the dashboard.

> I'm not ever going to talk to my phone

Maybe you won't, but there's still value in being able to use it hands free. "Hey Siri, call (name) on speaker" is something I regularly ask it to do while I'm driving.

Apple never wargamed the Siri dialogue tree for iPhone `lost and found' recovery safely return to owner the one time first time I tried to use it seriously.

Yes that's because Apple marketing is always wildly overhyping the capacities of what they are selling.

In this case the lie was that Siri could understand you just like a real human but it really can't. AI chat bots have some similar problems (figuring out what it can actually do) but at least they are much better at communicating like a human.

Siri is almost comically bad. Just one recent anecdote:

When discussing a Jeopardy answer with my wife, I say "Hey Siri, who was Pol Pot". Siri said, "OK, calling Scott". So it woke up my friend at 1am..

And if I hear another "I found this on the web", I'm going to scream.

Siri is so bad it makes me want to go back to a pixel.

It's always shocked me how dogshit Siri is. I run into this one every day:

"Siri, play some music"

"Sorry you will need to unlock your phone to do that"

"Siri, play some music"

I wish I could speak my unlock code so I didn't have to, you know, take my eyes off the road in order to play music or change my GPS destination or something like that.

I'm not saying that way to solve a problem, but I refuse to believe that it has to be as bad as it is. The worst part is that it's still better than the alternative of leaving the iOS ecosystem.

Apple is just so bizarre in general. I would say "nowadays" but I think they have always been like this. It took them how many decades to add a unit converter to the iPhone? And after all that time, they buried it in a menu in the Calculator app?

This but the response to the second command is, “I found some web results…”

I had a nearly identical anecdote. I was driving my car to work soon I had moved to the Bay Area. I wanted to know what city I was currently on.

"Hey Siri, what city am I in?"

"Calling Ian"

Was Ian able to help, at least?

We need to separate three separate issues. I work with call centers and I always need to discuss all three

1. Voice to text transcriptions

2. Text to understanding

3. Adding capabilities where it can do something with #2.

The voice to text that Siri uses seems to be worse than when you are dictating using voice to text from the keyboard.

The latter gets close to 100% with my southern native English accent and does okay when I’m trying to speak Spanish. Siri messes up with English a lot more and it’s a lost cause when I try to speak Spanish.

When they switched to "ML" (this was way before ChatGPT ate the world) Siri's speech to text went to absolute shit.

I suspect they had a very carefully hand-crafted model before, and replaced it with an ML model "that will fix itself over time" - and it never did.

I have a British accent and the speech-to-text from the keyboard is also terrible.

Honestly with these assistants I'd rather just type my query. Voice input is embarrassing and error-prone. The only place that voice input is useful is in the kitchen.

Counter anecdote: I also have a British accent, and while I find Siri as shit as everyone else in this thread the dictation built into the iOS keyboard very rarely has a problem with my accent. I'm fairly close to Received Pronunciation, which I'd guess is one of the easier British accents for Siri to understand.

(I do often get frustrated with dictation quirks that don't have anything to do with my accent, like it choosing the obviously wrong option when their are multiple words that sound the same, especially its insistence on assuming I'm saying the name of a contact rather than the common noun that sounds the same.)

hey war criminal talk is reserved for before midnight only!

"here are some pictures of pot pot"

There was a time when Siri would confirm before making a phone call. But now it will call anyone, including people I've literally never called (and rarely text), without confirmation. This seems like a bad outcome that is very easy to fix.

Especially when it happens at night.

But I'll not preted Google is any better. Last I used it would have call "CTO of the company I worked for" or "Send message to random friend-of-a-friend that I once helped" as suggested actions in the middle of the night. (Maybe it has improved now? I used to be comically bad, as was other large tech companies: https://erik.itland.no/tag:aifails)

Yeah this is one reason I've ordered a OnePlus as my next phone.

I know there is an infinite list of reasons Siri sucks but one that really irks me is now Siri can be integrated with ChatGPT. You can also change settings so it will automatically query ChatGPT without asking…

Yet Siri will still tell you about a web results on your phone… but sometimes same question asked? Will check ChatGPT and give you an actual answer (15% hit rate?).

ARG!!!!

From the outside looking in it really feels like Apple focused so much on privacy and now has no strategy of how to make that work with AI right now.

People increasingly seem to forgo the idea of retaining the data for themselves because they find AI products so fascinating / useful that they're just not caring, at least for the moment. I think this might swing back in the favor of Apple at one point, but right now it is kind of fascinating how liberally people throw everything at hosted AI models.

I personally hope Apple doesn’t get too involved in the madness. If the sentiment changes they’ll be in a great position messaging wise. Microsoft and Google have thrown their reputations away.

> it really feels like Apple focused so much on privacy and now has no strategy of how to make that work with AI right now

I see Apple dusting off its OG playbook.

We're in the minicomputing era of AI. If scaling continues to bear fruit, we'll stay there for some time. Potentially indefinitely. If, however, scaling plateaus, miniaturisation retakes precedence. At that point, Apple's hardware (and Google's mindshare) incumbency gains precedence.

In the meantime, Apple builds devices and writes the OS that commands how the richest consumers on Earth store and transmit their data. That gives them a default seat at every AI table, whether they bother to show up or not.

It could benefit them if they remained an AI free or a NOT AI first alternative once enshitification has really taken hold with AI.

If there's a company who could ever afford to be late to the party is apple though.

Not the first to bring mp3 players to the market, nor phones, nor tablets. Market leader every time.

They could have just stayed in a corner talking about privacy, offer a solid experience while everything else drowns in slop, researched UX for llms and come 5 years later with a killer product.

I don't get why they went for the rush. It's not like AI is killing their hardware sales either.

Because today they're racing against regulators for the privilege of setting their own service as the preinstalled, exclusive, default with APIs only they are allowed to use.

They already lost this superpower in the EU and I think Japan, India, Brazil too. Early next year they've got their US antitrust trial, and later in the year are some class actions challenging their control over app distribution, and at least two pieces of draft legislation are circulating that would require allowing competing apps to be defaults.

If they need another two years they might face an entrenched and perhaps even better competitor, while their own app needs to be downloaded from the App Store.

That's a great point and an easy way to visualize it as an outsider, but it's not necessarily that simple.

For one thing, the iPad (market-leading tablet) and the iPhone (market-leading pocket touchscreen device) were not their first attempt at doing that. That would be the Newton, which was an actual launched product and a commercial failure.

For another thing, even Apple can't just become the market leader by doing nothing. They need to enter late with a good product, and having a good product takes R&D, which takes time. With MP3 players, smartphones, and tablets, they didn't exactly wait until the industry was burnt through before they came in with their offering; they were just later (with the successful product) than some other people who did it worse. They were still doing R&D during those years when they were "waiting."

Apple could still "show up late" to AI in a few more years or a decade, using their current toe-dipping to inform something better, and it would still fit into the picture you have of how they "should've done it." Not to mention, Apple's also lost its way before with things like convoluted product lines (a dozen models of everything) and experimental products (the Newton then, Apple Vision now); messing up for a while also isn't exactly bucking history.

I see your point, but I see nothing to indicate they’re doing the “polish and wait”. No reason to believe they’re cooking behind the scenes or that this product was a learning exercise for them.

Most of their current products seem to be decaying in the dead march towards the next yearly release. ux and ui are becoming more and more poorly thought (see their last design language). They half pursue ideas and don’t manage to deliver (vr, apple car, etc).

I see cargo culting and fad chasing like any average leadership, only with a fatter stack of cash supporting the endeavour.

We basically know what they are cooking behind the scenes - to write a $1 Billion check to Google for a custom Gemini model

I guess I'm not necessarily saying they're secretly working on it now, but I'm responding to your "I don't get why they went for the rush" with "it doesn't seem like they really went for the rush" (any more than the Newton was evidence that they "went for the rush" of smartphones or tablets).

As someone who bought and used various MP3 players before getting an iPod I disagree.

They were not technically first at creating a portable music player that relied on digital compressed format and digital storage, that's true. However before the iPod, you had either very low storage capacity, reliance on expensive memory cards that you would need to swap or hard drive based players that were unpractical to carry around.

Those solutions also had generally terrible user interface that made things like browsing the library or seeking in a track a pain in the ass. It was a moderate improvement on already existing solutions. It wasn't that much better than a MP3 CD player (especially after they figured out buffering to avoid skipping because of movement). I had a mini-disc player in parallel to the MP3s and it was generally a better solution: cheaper for managing a big library and it had compression. Physical media management was still a problem but that was also a requirement for MP3 player of practical size that used memory cards (and those were awfully expensive).

Then Apple came in with a solution using the newer 1,8 inch hard drive format with a starting capacity of 5GB, which would be bumped to 10GB shortly. It changed everything, it was practical in portability/pocketability, storage capacity and user interface. My brother bought an Archos player released around the same time and it was just a joke compared to the iPod (he got it because it was on sale for much cheaper).

So yeah, technically Apple was not the first to commercialize an MP3 player. But they trailed the earliest entrant in the market only by a few years (about 3) and they basically defined the market. Before the iPod, MP3 players were mostly a waste of money and a curiosity at best. The experience they would offer for the price was ridiculous. The iPod was expensive but it was a major improvement in every way, it made the Portable Media Player not only a possibility but something very desirable because it was useful and competent. The iPhone is basically the same story and before that the Mac (for DTP) and even before that the Apple II (for general computing access to individuals).

I feel that when people argue about Apple being late on innovation they are arguing in bad faith to justify current mismanagement (because they make a shit ton of money regardless). But it's basically splitting hairs. Yes Apple was never strictly first on purely technical grounds but they were always the first at creating a consumer product that would actually be able to achieve the purpose it was supposed to in a satisfactory manner.

Was the failure really driven by privacy policy? Long term a privacy play is the right move. But right now, Siri's capabilities even underwhelm vis-a-vis a model with no understanding of user context that is just interpreting commands.

Yeah, I'm not buying that either/or framing too

Agreed. I often have to verbally battle with Siri to do the most basic interaction. Siri recognizes all my words but misinterprets my intent and does something I didn’t want.

The new Alexa uses Claude under the hood, and it also misinterprets my intent, only with a 2 second longer delay and slightly more approachable tone.

Yeah and the fact that this basically hasn’t improved in a decade tells me that it’s likely that nobody actually works on Siri.

Not to mention the iOS keyboard has gotten so bad in the last year that it took me 3x longer to type this comment (I use the swipe keyboard). I had to fix at least a dozen typos.

Every now and then when they screw up, they’ll have a mea culpa with the press. They haven’t done that with Siri or the keyboard yet.

It was driven by privacy and on device compute.

Anything you ask an Android device to do, or an Alexa device goes to their clouds to be 100% processed there.

Apple tried to make a small and focused interface that could do a limited set of things on device without going to the cloud to do it.

This was built around the idea of "Intents" and it only did the standard intents... and app developers were supposed to register and link into them.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/intents

Some of the things didn't really get fleshed out, some are "oh, that's something in there?" (Restaurant reservations? Ride Booking?) and feels more like the half baked mysql interfaces in php.

However, as part of privacy - you can create a note (and dictate it) without a data connection with Siri. Your "start workout" command doesn't leave your device.

Part of that is privacy. Part of that is that Apple was trying to minimize its cloud spend (on GCP or AWS) by keeping as much of that activity on device. It wasn't entirely on device, but a lot more of it is than what Android is... and Alexa is a speaker and microphone hooked up to AWS.

This was ok, kind of meh, but ok pre-ChatGPT. With ChatGPT the expectations changed and the architecture that Apple had was not something that could pivot to meeting those expectations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Intelligence

> Apple first implemented artificial intelligence features in its products with the release of Siri in the iPhone 4S in 2011.

> ...

> The rapid development of generative artificial intelligence and the release of ChatGPT in late 2022 reportedly blindsided Apple executives and forced the company to refocus its efforts on AI.

ChatGPT was as much a blindside to Apple as the iPhone was to Blackberry.

I think all of these are true:

1. Apple is big enough that it needs to take care of edge cases like offline & limited cell reception, which affect millions in any given moment.

2. Launching a major UI feature (Siri) that people will come to rely on requires offline operation for common operations like basic device operations and dictation. Major UI features shouldn't cease to function when they enter bad reception zones.

3. Apple builds devices with great CPUs, which allows them to pursue a strategy of using edge compute to reduce spend.

4. A consequence of building products with good offline support is they are more private.

5. Apple didn't even build a full set of intents for most of their apps, hence 'remind me at this location' doesn't even work. App developers haven't either, because ...

6. Siri (both the local version and remote service) isn't very good, and regularly misunderstands or fails at basic comprehension tasks that do not even require user data to be understood or relayed back to devices to execute.

I don't buy that privacy is somehow an impediment to #5 or #6. It's only an issue when user data is involved, and Apple has been investing in techs like differential privacy to get around these limitations to some extent. But that is further downstream from #5 and #6 though.

Dragon Naturally Speaking was way more accurate than Siri is now, and it was on-device on ancient computers.

I don't care if I have to carefully say "bibbidy bobbity boo, set an alarm for two" - I just need it to be reliable.

Siri could've done better but Apple is definitely taking big risks with their privacy play. They might just corner themselves.

My understanding is they are just stubborn. They once did it this way and now it is "the Apple way".

Recent example: Apple used to hide "search in page" in the share menu in mobile safari. Far from obvious, but at some point one discovers it because there is no other place to look for it.

Now they have finally decided to make a standard fly dropping overflow menu and hide the share button there. But interestingly you still need to open the share menu from there to find the search button.

Meanwhile other buttons that weren't as obviously misplaced in "share" like "Add to Bookmarks" are now on the top level together with the share button.

Same goes for the arguments against things like cut and paste in finder: they didn't create it back in the day and now there is a complete mythology about why cut and paste in Finder would actually be stupid and almost evil.

FYI, an easier way to search in pages in Safari is to just type what you want to search for in the address bar, and then at the bottom of the list of suggestions (you may need to scroll it down) you can tap "On this page".

After 7 years I learned. Thank you!

How did you learn this hack?

Glad to have helped!

I just noticed it randomly many years ago, I don't remember the occasion but I guess I was scrolling trying to find a page in history lazily and noticed it at the bottom.

It's an example that sums up feature discoverability (well, lack of) on iPhones - there are so many things like this, that are really useful to know if you find out about them but the only way to find out is luck or having a friend tell you. Occasionally the official Apple "Tips" app has useful stuff, but not much.

I actually have a thing in my family Signal chat of every few weeks sharing a new random iPhone tip, as I'm by far the nerdiest in the group. Maybe I should collate them all into a "hard to discover Tips" blog and share on HN...

Late, but thank you!

Both for explaining the simpler way to do it and also for the contect.

(Why? Because it feels good to know that I am not the only one who cannot find documentation for this and other things.)

If total invasion of privacy is the only way to make AI useful, then maybe it isn't useful?

Don't invert the argument, something can be enormously useful while also having an equally big effect on one's privacy.

You'd have to expand on that because I don't see why one is related to the other. People get value out of giving their data to OpenAI. They don't care. So what?

Yes, I think the question here is not so much why the old is leaving, but if anyone seriously expects the new guy to succeed any more? ex-Microsoft too, not exactly a great start.

What does seem slightly odd is Apple have probably saved billions by failing to be dragged into the current model war.

I agree that not falling for the hype and rushing in may have just saved them. Apple is typically not a first mover. They often hang back, rethink the problem, and deliver something really nice. But not in this case. They had Siri first and then squandered their lead, but may have avoided a huge write-down as a result.

it's still early days. plenty of time to win with AI.

> From the outside looking in it really feels like Apple focused so much on privacy and now has no strategy of how to make that work with AI right now.

Are you referring to https://security.apple.com/com/blog/private-cloud-compute/?

The only way that AI will ever be able to replace each of us, is if it gathers our entire audio, text, etc history. PCC seemed like the only viable option for a pro-AI, yet pro-privacy person such as myself. I thought PCC was one of the most thoughtful things I had every seen a FAANG create. Seriously, whoever pushed that should get some kind of medal.

Are you saying that there is no technical solution for privacy and AI to coexist? Not only that, but that was the blocker?

I am genuinely interested if anyone can provide a technical answer.

They are solving for privacy before solving for the UX.

They should actually make something useful first, and then work backwards to making it private before releasing it.

With 1B+ users Apple isn't in the position to do the typical startup fast & loose order of operations. Apple has (rightly) given themselves the responsibility to protect people's privacy, and a lot of people rely on that. It'd be a really bad look if it turned out they made Siri really really useful but then hostile govt's all got access to the data and cracked down on a bunch of vulnerable people.

Making privacy some end-goal that PMs cut to meet targets is how you end up with Google redefining privacy to mean "only we have access to every aspect of your life, now and in the future".

If Apple takes the position that the UX has to fit in around the privacy requirements, so what? Privacy is a core pillar of their product identity—a built-in hallucinating compliments machine isn't.

To be fair, Google have always treated privacy that way, long before they used any of that data.

I find it hard to believe privacy is the issue. Chinese companies have no issue releasing great self hostable models (and some admittedly nearly impossible to self host due to the sheer size)

China does not care about personal privacy, they only care about privacy beyond their political boundaries.

If you've never been to China, you need to look no further than the streets to understand this (cameras everywhere, social credit system, etc.)

People only want privacy if it doesn’t come at the cost of a good product. It’s not enough on its own.

I think the only department involved in privacy at apple is the marketing department. Nobody else has worked in anything related.

> Apple focused so much on privacy

Apple also doesn't have actual privacy since their focus was using the word strategically against their competitors, not actually protecting user data.

> Subramanya, who Apple describes as a "renowned AI researcher," spent 16 years at Google, where he was head of engineering for Gemini. He left Google earlier this year for Microsoft. In a press release, Apple said that Subramanya will report to Craig Federighi and will "be leading critical areas, including Apple Foundation Models, ML research, and AI Safety and Evaluation."

I don't see how Google + Copilot mindset even touches on privacy. I wouldn't be surprised if we users will be forced to pay even more personal data in the near future.

> Apple also doesn't have actual privacy since their focus was using the word strategically against their competitors, not actually protecting user data.

big company bad, or do you have examples?

Examples for what? Name one feature that isn’t performative privacy to look good in press releases? - it’s probably opt in, Apple somehow excludes themselves from the list of baddies, can’t be audited, there are different ways to get the data, etc.

Remember they even had an ad campaign “what happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone” which is technically incorrect and “smarter Siri” can’t exist around such promises atm.

Can you install any app on your phone without giving all your personal data to Apple?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41712728

https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/04/10/apple-makes-it-re...

https://sneak.berlin/20231005/apple-operating-system-surveil...

Focusing on privacy was obviously the right strategic move for Apple. People complain about Siri, but they still buy iPhones in huge volumes. And a huge part of that is the belief that it’s safe to use iPhones for private things.

In terms of actually building a profitable business, no one seems to know how to make that work with AI right now. Leaks suggest OpenAI may turn to ads to monetize ChatGPT… which will raise all sorts of data questions. Privacy concerns might yet be an issue with AI chatbots.

My theory that Apple are becoming Yahoo! keeps being proven true honestly. They have some massive advantages to build really incredible AI tools, infrastructure and hardware but they refuse to take it because they are fascinated by pointlessly making their UI look transparent.

Everyone is struggling to create AI tools. And just because you don't approve of how they spend time to make their UI look "fancy", doesn't really mean much. You are not a normal user/customer.

This sounds like you take slights toward Apple weirdly personally.

Not really. It more seems that you’re trying to make it personal.

It's ironic because Microsoft took their eye off smart phones to make Windows 8 transparent aqua interface

I don’t remember Windows 8 being particularly transparent. Windows 8 is remembered for the start screen with the modern tiles.

Right, I was thinking of Windows Vista before it

Now that you mention it, liquid glass does resemble windows vista.

The iphone is so useful they can probably ride it for a couple more decades at least. I would still buy it.

From a technology or engineering perspective, I have no idea how to work with Apple.

MacOS (or whatever they're calling it now) for all its faults is still probably the best desktop OS for getting things done without having to fiddle around much. ChromeOS is close but still so far in many ways.

And for audio production - I'm just a dabbler, really, but I've been able to do some really impressive things with just GarageBand and a Fender Mustang Micro amp-plug over USB-C. It "just works" unlike my experience on Linux recently, where there are lots of little bits that are genius, but I couldn't manage to figure out how to get a basic midi synth working with a DAW that had a UI that was designed for humans. (Jack is amazing, though - being able to do arbitrary audio filter chains with random pieces of software is seriously cool.)

> ChromeOS is close but still so far in many ways.

I continue to be impressed by ChromeOS. With the Linux development environment (Debian VM), it is a brilliant work environment.

Add Android apps as well and ChromeOS is an awesome convergence platform. There are Chromebooks that are high enough quality that I don't miss anything about Apple OS or Microsoft Windows.

> And for audio production

For specialty use-cases, driver support will favour Windows and Apple OS.

And gaming is still Windows-first, although Linux is improving.

It's not driver support for audio stuff. Drivers are great; haven't had any issues at all. The UI for the software, especially DAWs, is just plain garbage. It shouldn't be this bad; I'm halfway tempted to start my own project to put together a fork of one of these DAWs with a UX that doesn't suck.

Technically a lot of stuff for linux audio is amazing; it just lacks the level of polish to enable someone to actually just use it out of the box.

Yep, Chromebook are basically a sufficient information appliance for most people. I think this is why Apple is going to try a cheaper MacBook.

The MacBook Air is nice but it still too expensive for most people that only want to browser the web, use social media and edit a few documents once in a while. Their advantage in chip power and efficiency is not enough because people buying this won't make use of the power anyway and will rarely use it long enough at once for battery life to matter that much.

macOS, iPadOS and watchOS are all still the best at what they do.

Me installing an app to transfer a movie to my girlfriend's iPhone, but we don't have a cable for it. You need a third party app called LocalSend, but that can't work, because the only WiFi we have access to is a complicated university gateway that won't support LocalSend, so I open up a mobile hotspot, but somehow iPhones can't connect to that. So we give up.

Airdrop?

Airdrop on Android?

Indeed, the UI designers are 100% transferable to AI R&D.

I really want to be quite harsh, but instead I’ll try to constructively explain it; if you spend time, resources, focus and money on making your product worse like Apple are and actively not make your AI assistant better for 15 years then there’s a problem. You as Apple can obviously hire some AI R&D and software engineers to improve your options. My comments about transparent UI are the tip of a much larger iceberg.

If this video is to believed, this is the result of internal Apple politics between the software engineering folks, and the AI folks, with the software engineering folks "winning"

https://youtu.be/50XKNKGPWs8?si=nznI4ydFBT5pXfNa

If that’s true it would be quite interesting, as the AI folks are winning almost everywhere else in the software industry, notably at Google.

I can believe that this is a case of the Software Engineering team being effective in a way that the AI/ML team wasn't. Apple's internal culture is notoriously closed and secretive, not the best way to approach cutting-edge AI research, especially when it wasn't their core competency in the first place.

But mainly I wanted to share that video because Craig Federighi calling the AI/ML team "AI/MLess" is one heck of a burn

Apple AI team launched Apple Intelligence before it was fully baked. That's a no-no by Apple standards.

Siri's awfulness really is a thing to behold. I haven't used an android phone in a while. For those users out there, does its voice assistant actually work?

No. actually no company on earth has solved the voice assistant thing yet

How is that even possible with modern transcribing and natural language capabilities?

Exactly. Looks like everybody's complaining that Siri isn't a better Ask Jeeves, when that's not the design goal. What people expect is an LLM that has full access to the phone. Nobody's even remotely close to shipping that.

I just want "set timer for 5 minutes" and "what time is it" to work reliably, 100% of the time.

Works on Siri! You can even set – get this – multiple timers ;)

I seem to get about 90%; wife gets closer to 80%. I just want it to be better.

Activate Siri and then say the amount of time you'd like on the timer. For me, that's holding the side button then only saying, "20 minutes."

The one caveat is that once the timer you want is two and a half hours or longer, then Siri replies by asking what you would like to convert to.

That may be it - we’re always asking a HomePod to do it - “hey siri set timer for five minutes”

My Siri-initiated timers are always done with my phone, probably 50 or more each week (work stuff). The only time I get a failure is when I release the side button too quickly. I've made certain the spoken feedback is enabled to reduce the risk of me making that mistake. (Settings > Siri > Siri Responses > Prefer Spoken Responses)

As for, "What time is it?"... Try activating Siri and only saying, "Time."

I suspect that's the main difference; if you're trying to use hands-free voice activation via "hey Siri" you get a much different experience than if you can touch the watch/phone to trigger Siri first.

And thinking back over it, more than half the failures are complete - e.g., it likely never activated at all. Very few are "it set a timer, but for the wrong time".

Good chance that's what captures our different Siri experiences. The few times I've done it spoken was always with AirPods and I always waited for the Siri reply (been a while; is it, "Uh-huh"?) after I said, "Hey, Siri." But my experience activating Siri with speech is so minimal as to be untrustworthy of anything broader.

I guess it depends on what you mean by voice assistant.

But Android has been 100% accurate for simple commands for over a decade for me. Things like:

- "weather." tells me forecast of where I am.

- "alarm at 8am" and "alarm in 30 minutes" works as expected.

- calendar commands also work

My favourite is "go home" which opens Google map with a route to home.

These things just work. I don't recall last time I had to repeat myself.

I wonder if we are getting different versions based on geolocation (I'm in Europe) because my experience is the absolute opposite of this. I actually had the thought "maybe I should switch to apple to stop having to deal with this" just this week (although reading this thread siri is as bad).

My experience is only through android auto and it honestly makes me furious how bad it is. There is absolutely no other tech product in my life that gets even close to how bad voice commands are handled in Android.

In my experience, literally everything sucks:

- single language voice recognition (me speaking in English with an accent)

- multi language voice recognition (english commands that include localised names from the country I'm in)

- action in context (understand what I'm actually asking it to do)

- supported actions (what it can actually do)

Some practical examples from just this week:

- I had to repeat 3 times that "no I don't want to reply" because I made the mistake of getting google to read a whatsapp message while driving, and it got stuck into the "would you like to reply" (it almost always gets stuck - it's my goto example to show people how bad it is)

- I asked it to queue a very specific playlist on Spotify, and it just couldn't get it right (no matter how specific my command was, I couldn't get it to play a playlist from MY. account instead of playing an unrelated public playlist)

- I asked to add a song to a playlist, and it said it couldn't do that (at least it understood what I was asking? maybe)

And in general I gave up trying to use google maps through voice commands, because it's just not capable of understanding an English command if it contains a street/location name pronounced in the local language/accent.

I use it almost daily, to set timers and alarms

Same thing I used it for 10 years ago hahaha

I used to use it for that. A few months ago I got an Android system update and it no longer works for that. It just does web searches if I try. Now it's trying to push me into this thing where it takes a screenshot and tells me what's on the screen. I've never once cared about that.

Failing to find any way to get the alarm thing back, I turned off the entire assistant thing.

Could you share a bit about your use case/experience? Siri does what I need it to do— send messages, create reminders and calendar entries, look up basic facts and cites the source, play music, add things to lists, etc. I’m curious if you’re trying to do things that I haven’t, or if you’re just having a very different experience with those same things? Or maybe just have higher expectations for it?

Edit: why in gods name are people downvoting me for politely asking about someone’s differing experience?

The very first thing I tried when Siri was released -- "set an alarm for ten minutes before sunset" -- still doesn't work. "What time is sunset?" and "Set an alarm for 5:03 PM" both worked on day one, and still work. Zero progress.

Interesting. I think I probably mentally separate the information retrieval realm and the command execution realm more than makes sense for the interface. There’s no apparent reason that shouldn’t work based on what the user is given.

I have never been able to play music with Siri. Even something as simple as “play this specific album” gets completely bungled.

Interesting— I use that functionality constantly and listen to a wide variety of artists, some of them pretty obscure. Do you use Apple Music or another service?

I can think of one time recently where no matter how I prompted it to play an album for (decades old but probably triple platinum,) it kept playing some cardi b song with the band’s name in the title instead… but that’s probably like a 1 in 2000 request problem. Maybe its a genre thing?

It’s extremely hit or miss for me. Sometimes it works and I’m amazed. Other times it fails to play my main playlist that I’ve played 1000 times before.

Huh. I’d love to see what their UX testing looked like. It clearly missed someone doing what you’re doing with it, sadly.

Yea, I’m boggled. At this point Siri should be able to parse and understand a wide variety of forms of the same command, but it still seems to fail. This should be doable even without LLMs.

Yeah I can ask it to play specific editions of specific EPs named the same or similar thing to the albums or whatever and it rarely screws up. There’s got to be something significantly different in our approach. I wish I could test it.

"Siri, play The Dragonborn comes at 25% volume"

"Here is what I found about "The Dragonborn comes at 25" on the Internet" opens Safari

Ah I never felt inspired to use it on a computer and always use physical volume controls in the car and through headphones, so I wouldn’t have run into that. It does seem like something that should be a day-one sort of feature.

"First you have to unlock your iphone"

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

I swear I've gotten that response, from a nearby HomePod, while holding my unlocked iPhone in my hands.

I don't know what it is doing sometimes.

The only time I find Siri useful, or I should say ~potentially~ useful, is while driving text, call and to ask basic facts. The amount of times I've heard "I can't show you that right now" after basic questions is insane. I just stopped asking it questions. Recently I asked "what engine is in a 2022 f150". Trying it without Carplay now, it literally just displays text. It should be able to TTS those results. What on earth have they been working on if not things like that?

I know there at least used to be a setting to specify if you get a verbal or text response based on whether or not the phone is locked. Maybe that would get it to stop just displaying text?

I pretty much only use it when I can’t look at the phone so I’m not sure if it’s still there.

> Siri does what I need it to do

Not true for me at all, it fails at the most basic tasks, sometimes even at tasks it has done before. Three examples:

- "Timer 5 minutes" -> Loading spinner is shown. Siri disappears after a few seconds. No error, no confirmation. I then have to manually check if the timer was set or not (it was not).

- "Turn on the lights in the living room" to which it responds "Sorry, I cannot do that". I have Phillips Hue lights that are connected to Apple Home, of course Siri can do that. It did that before.

- "Add tooth paste to my shopping list". The shopping list is a list I have in reminders. It then tries to search for the query on Google. I then tried "Add tooth paste to the list shopping list in reminders" which worked, but if I have to be this wordy, it is no longer any convenient.

There are many more simple cases in which Siri always / sometimes fails. I also have the feeling that it performs far worse if asked in my native language (German) than in English.

Yeah that’s strange. I set timers constantly both at home and work and I can’t recall a single time it hasn’t worked. I periodically add things to lists without issue. I have zero experience using it in another language. Maybe their testing sucked for that?

The lights thing is insane and annoying.

"Turn on living room lights" - "There are no lights in the living room"

"Turn on living room lights" - lights turn on.

Naming some of my lights Greg has helped a bit.

‘Siri turn on torch’. Used to work, now all I get is “sorry, Torch isn’t available right now” this is at night when it is plugged in and I need to work as a nightlight to go open the bedroom door to let the dog in or out without blasting myself awake with the main phaser array next to my bed.

It works pretty well for me, but doesn't do nearly what I'd expect.

EG I can talk to it like I would chatgpt and it works well. But I can't be like "hey I want to get dinner with my wife on our anniversary, please book the best available option in my city for fine dining"

It's still way better than Siri, which feels like a voice CLI to me (same as Alexa, which is very low quality IME)

I don’t think I’d want to talk to a voice assistant like that. Maybe it’s a generational thing? Things like that are ambiguous enough discussing them with human beings and a big part of things like voice assistants is understanding how it’s going to interpret and execute a response based on what I say to it.

It works okay. I like that it's universal (the same assistant on my phone, on my home devices, in my car, in my earbuds). I like that it does tasks right, but you have to know how to phrase them (my most common is probably "remind me to X tomorrow at X time"). Setting alarms and timers, creating calendar events, asking about the weather on a specific day or in a specific place, asking how long it'll take to walk/drive somewhere -- all good. But anything more complicated than that and you get erratic behaviour. From what I've seen with my friends interacting with Siri, I'd say they're about equal in capability.

Its gemini so at least its smartish and has some integration with the rest of the ecosystem so it can do some assistant work as long as its read mostly, but integration with the rest of the phone is almost non existent. It also struggle in noisy environments and in mixed language situations

If they didn’t have so many limitations imposed for safety or by permissioning. Hey Google call my wife. 30 seconds later “something has gone wrong”. Or hey Google play _______ on YouTube music. “Playing something else on you tube music”. Its stupid.

The current situation on Google's Android Pixel phones is odd. The old non-LLM Google Assistant works well in a limited domain: Things like setting alarms, phoning by name, etc. It's similar in scope to Siri, but with better voice recognition, and better context awareness. However, Google is desperate to kill Google Assistant and force all Pixel users to use Gemini instead. Gemini 3 is a very good LLM, and far, far, far more versatile than Google Assistant. But Gemini won't do the simple things as reliably as the old Assistant. Setting an alarm works maybe 90% of the time with Gemini. If you asked the old Assistant "What time is it?" it would respond "It's 4:40 PM". If you ask Gemini "What time is it?" it will sometimes respond "It's 4:40 PM CDT in {your city}", but sometimes it will say "It's four four zero Pee Em in {your city}" and sometimes it will do a web search. Results are spotty in other areas like voice dialing. I've retained the old Assistant, because I want to do the basic things far more often than I want to verbally vibe code. But rumor has it Google is going to disable the old Assistant in March, forcing all users onto Gemini for voice commands. Unless Gemini gets much better at handling simple tasks by then, Pixel users will end up with a voice assistant much more frustrating than Siri.

Not to mention all the useless LLM fluff Gemini has. I turned off Gemini because simple questions like "What's 1 USD in AUD" would be met with 30 seconds of "As a large language model, I can't provide investment advice, so it's always important to check information yourself [...], but one Australian dollar is approximately $0.65" (note the conversion in the wrong direction). By comparison, Google Assistant just gives you a number straight away.

They should have deterministic actions for certain non fungibles and let the LLM do the rest.

Pretty much the same as Siri. Alexa isn't any better either.

I know one feature Siri has added in the past fifteen years, because I always complained that Siri couldn't "text this photo to my wife." I would demonstrate to people that this doesn't work, complain about the lack of discoverability, and mention how with each new release of iOS I would try it again to confirm it still didn't work.

Then one time, in a job interview of all things, (I'm a PM and was asked for an example of a product I liked or didn't like) I went into this spiel, and what do you know, Siri texted the photo to my wife. :-)

So somewhere along the way they did add that feature, and apparently I didn't realize I had missed checking for it.

Siri will sometimes describe a photo sent to me whilst driving, and be surprisingly accurate - "a child holding a can of soup"

And then half the time it's "a screenshot of a social media post" - c'mon, read the damn text from the screenshot at least!

They definitely do change things and not always for the better. I used to start running/walking workouts from the Apple Watch telling Siri something along the lines of "let's get running!" or "let's go for a walk" to which it would react starting the right kind of workout. Since WatchOS 26 it tells me it doesn't know where I am and something about privacy settings, and that's it. Asking in robot mode it does work though: "start running workout"

So the new VP for AI comes from Microsoft, after having only been there for a couple months? I'd be a little bit concerned about that, someone jumping ship so quickly.

Also, Apple tends to recruit internally first for VP positions, which they didn't do in this case. I am sure they considered internal candidates though, but I feel they're getting a bit "desperate" in the AI game to show progress.

Unfortunate that JG is the fall guy for Siri. He was very successful at Google (e.g. BERT was published just after he left), but it looks like he wasn't able to save Apple from itself.

> Unfortunate that JG is the fall guy for Siri...

From TFA

  Some of the teams that Giannandrea oversaw will move to Sabih Khan and Eddy Cue, such as AI Infrastructure and Search and Knowledge. Khan is Apple's new Chief Operating Officer who took over for Jeff Williams earlier this year ... Apple CEO Tim Cook thanked Giannandrea ...

Seems like Khan is preparing the mothership for when he eventually assumes the CEO role from Cook.

odd, why not Craig? he's by far the popular pick + probably actually right leader for apple's ai phase

Craig seems the type that would prefer to be closer to the tools than to be a CEO and manage all the other stuff that comes with it...

The various interviews I've watched of his (and some of the leaked news) shows he's still quite deep in the tools.

He's pure creativitiy, that guy! I think it'll drain his energy if he needed to do more admin stuff.

John Ternus is rumored to be the leading candidate for the next CEO. That would also make more sense in terms of age.

>Seems like Khan is preparing the mothership

Nah, IS&T has always been under the CFO, and apparently some fraction of AIML is headed under them.

Ahh jeez, Khan is COO not CFO.

brief career timeline:

1980s - silicon graphics / general magic

1990s - chief technologist, netscape

early 2000s - CTO Tellme (speech recognition)

late 2000s - CTO Metaweb (knowledge graph) -> acquired into Google

2010s - Google head of Machine Intelligence, Search, Gmail Smart Reply, etc, then took over Google Search and ML driven ranking (BERT)

2018 -> SVP ML/AI Apple to merge Siri/Core ML/all AI offerings under one roof

2023-2025 - led Apple Intelligence push

March 2025 - removed as head of Siri

Dec 2025 - retirement

would love to do an exit interview with him on the last 4 decades in building ai assistants!

-- https://x.com/markgurman/status/1995617560373706942?s=20

cv of his successor Amar Subramanya - 16 years at GDM - head of eng for Gemini chatbot/training. joined microsoft in JULY this year.. and now poached to Apple. lmao.

I remember Tellme. They had an 800 number for free information via speech query but, of course, it was also for training ala 411GOOG. Fun times.

I miss 411GOOG. It was fun and felt like a cool fusion of new and old tech.

Its purpose was to get training data for speech recognition. Once Google’s speech recognition was working reliably, there wasn’t much reason to offer the service got free.

This might be my new favourite definition of "failing upwards".

Where did they fail besides Siri? The rest look like fine achievements to me.

Netscape was the market leading browser into the early 2000s, corresponding with JG leaving it.

Never heard of Tellme, but it sounds impressive on a resume.

Metaweb was a good open-source fact database which subsequently got walled off once Google bought it.

Google Search works significantly worse now than it did under Amit, and I say that as both a user and a websearch Xoogler. (JG took over about a year after I left Google).

Siri is the subject of this article.

can you substantiate "works significantly worse"? because obviously JG and whoever else worked on the BERT upgrade would disagree, but i am genuinely interested in contrarian takes.

This is quite a spectacular CV.

Now I'm weighing more on the Apple side for not making it better.

the truth is ~none of us in the HN peanut gallery have any appreciation for what its like managing AI inside software inside Apple. it's less a technical role and more of an executive/politics/leadership role. im sure the disappointing progress shares a lot of blame and he was unfortunately the fall guy. estimated compensation $10-30m/yr for last 7 years tho...

This is good context to add to the article, because he's basically at retirement age anyways. Depends a little on whether 1980s means "1980" or "1989" but with that resume I think he can afford retirement even if it's 1989 :)

I tried Siri once when it first came out to play a song while I was driving and instead it started calling my ex-girlfriend. After that I swore it off for good.

Was anything even attempted? Looking from outside, Siri is same always been, and no improvement in a decade.

Supposedly the main blocker for launching is because Apple would consider it reputational damage if the AI hallucinates. They have a very conservative approach when it comes to LLMs (on the other hand they are happy to scan all your photos and messages in the guise of child safety and send the data to the government and ChatControl).

Problem is, Siri is already damaging Apple's reputation with how useless it is..

I remember buying the iPhone 4S in 2011, and it being the first iPhone to ship with Siri. It's 2025, and Siri is still fundamentally useless.

Well, it's still powered by the old codebase doing slot-filling named entity/intent detection that will route you to safari the moment it gets stuck ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

no, it's very useful for setting timers and for setting garbled reminders for a soon enough time that I'll remember what I actually meant rather than being confused by whatever it spewed out instead!

Yeah, I guess I've always distinguished "hallucinating" as e.g I asked for a chicken soup recipe and it told me how to make cyanide. Vs some social media person prompt hacking it to say fascism is good, etc. I've seen more of the latter than the former.

Ten years ago, if it didn't understand what I meant, it told me so after 1-2 seconds.

Now, it'll show a loading indicator for 5-6 seconds and then do nothing at all... or do something entirely unrelated to my request (eg responding to "hey siri, how much is fourteen kilograms in pounds" by playing a song from my music library).

Just like a person would!

Apple shot themselves in the foot in the late 2010s by switching to deep learning methods and making things slower and worse, with the spell checker being the worst example.

This is exactly it. Siri was improving slowly until they tried their "ML" stuff and it became noticeably worse.

> or do something entirely unrelated to my request (eg responding to "hey siri, how much is fourteen kilograms in pounds" by playing a song from my music library

My personal favourite is Siri responding to a request to open the garage door, a request it had successfully fielded hundreds of times before, by placing a call to the Tanzanian embassy. (I've never been to Tanzania. If I have a connection to it, it's unknown to me. The best I can come up with is Zanzibar sort of sounds like garage door.)

I'm amazed more AI tools don't have reality checks as part of the command flow. If you take a UX-first perspective on AI - which Apple very much should - there's going to be x% failures to interpret correctly, causing some unintended and undesirable action. A reasonable way to handle these failure cases is to have a post-interpretation reality check.

This could be personalized, 'does this user do this kind of thing?' which checks history of user actions for anything similar. Or it could be generic, 'is this the type of thing a typical user does?'

In both cases, if it's unfamiliar you have a few options: try to interpret it again (maybe with a better model), raise a prompt with the user ('do you want to do x?'), or if it's highly unfamiliar, auto cancel the command and say sorry.

I don't have anything in my music library, both Siri and Alexa (via a Spotify account I don't have) have responded to "${room I'm in} on" with their versions of "I can't find ${room name} in your music collection".

“Hey Siri, call Kate”… “Calling Derek” (who I haven’t spoken to in 10 years).

"Siri, play podcasts"

"Who is speaking?"

The same person who has been speaking the last hundred times, dammit!

I'm really surprised this got any fanfare at all from Apple. Kind of confirms a single person as the reason for their continual AI misses which feels weird for them.

Nah, ksec had a great post in a thread a few months ago about a number of senior execs Tim Cook has promoted to positions to which they're ill-suited. John Giannandrea was just one of many such people:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43436174

An organization of Apple's size doesn't fail due to the mistakes of a single person, unless that person is the CEO.

I think the main issue I have with Apple Intelligence via Siri is that it’s not very predictable anymore which things it can handle. Sometimes it will answer nuanced questions helpfully, and other times I’ll ask for it to play the only podcast in my lineup and it’ll instead play some random song I’ve never heard of. I find it more useful when I’m thinking and running and want an answer to a question, because I know I can get the answer whenever I stop long enough to pull my phone out, but in the meantime having the answer would help me work through something. I’d say my overall impression of the capabilities are negative, and it’s also not a surprise (it’s not like Apple pretended it can do things it can’t, which should have been their clue early on I guess)

Meanwhile android demanding I use Gemini and then telling me my Google account has no Gmail to turn on Gemini to add a calender entry

And then my exchange business plan telling me copilot is here over and over in a giant popup screen and then saying - it's not available yet

Kinda wish they’d bring back the “where should I hide a body?” Easter egg. Even if it wasn’t very capable, Siri could make me laugh.

I remember when I was a kid having an old iPod touch that didn’t support Siri and having to jailbreak it, find some weird poorly documented package in Cydia, and download that suspect package on my device while entering some (in hindsight) equally suspect servers into some really hard to find text field in settings that somehow™ enabled that old iPod touch use Siri.

All of that to realize Siri was kind of boring. Funny thing is it’s been over a decade and it’s maybe 20% better than it was at launch. MAYBE.

I don’t want to blame this one guy for all of that, but part of me can’t help but point at the leader and ask “you couldn’t have done better than… that?”

Siri is great for setting timers as long as they aren’t for 15 or 50 minutes.

Haven’t found anything else it’s useful for.

This is a serious question that's partially mine, but I'm asking because of all the comments here: Specifically, what HAS Apple done with Siri over 15 years?

Are there new functions I don't know about? I... can't think of anything else they'd add, but I literally do not understand what their engineers and managers working on Siri were doing on a daily basis. They must have been writing some code at some point. Did it just never launch? Am I simply ignorant?

They changed it from responding to "Hey Siri" to just "Siri".

And then there was that world-changing delivery of sports scores on demand.

My new iPhone no longer responds to Siri lol. I used to say "Siri, stop" to shut off an alarm. Now I actually have to say "Hey Siri, stop". :(

As of now, 333 Comments so far and all of them are either on Siri or AI problems.

I thought there is a much deeper problem, this is yet another Tim Cook hiring that didn't work. In fact I am not aware of a single SVP grade report to Tim Cook that came from outside of Apple were successful.

I just want whoever is next in line to make Siri perform reliably and consistently. Not 70% of the time of even 90% of the time, 100% of the time for the limited uses cases that most (perhaps just me?) people use it for:

- Call "person"

- Call "business" (please don't say "I don't see so and so in your contacts" and on a second try, work)

- Find "place" (while driving) - Define "phrase or word" (please don't say I found this on the web)

- Set a timer or alarm

- Check the messages (in a sane way)

- Set reminders (this one surprisingly works well)

- Use intents correctly (I just want to be able to say "play 99% invisible in Overcast")

It doesn't need to do all the fancy things they show-cased last year. It just needs to do the basics really well and build from there.

“Calling Noh Replee…”

I can't believe Apple still hasn't rolled back or majorly revamped AI notification summaries. It's been over a year since launch, and their primary use case is pretty much just sharing screenshots when it does something hilarious/inappropriate.

Underlying this seems to be a hard engineering problem: how to run a SaaS within UI timeframes that can store or ferry enough context to tailor for individual users, with privacy.

While Eddie Cue seems to be Apple's SaaS man, I can't say I'm confident that separating AI development and implementation is a good idea, or that Apple's implementation will not fall outside UI timeframes, given their other availability issues.

Unstated really is how good local models will be as an alternative to SaaS. That's been the gambit, and perhaps the prospective hardware-engineering CEO signals some breakthrough in the pipeline.

Seven years leading AI at Apple, and Siri never meaningfully improved for most users. Leadership changes alone won’t fix that, but maybe this is finally Apple acknowledging that its voice/AI strategy needs a reset.

The only usage of Siri to me is to set hot spot so that it doesn’t shut down itself in a few mins. (And BTW why the f does it do that?) But it has failed to switch on Hotspot recently so I don’t use it anymore.

'Hot spot' as in Settings->Personal Hotspot? I've had that enabled for more than 10 years, and could count the number of times I've found it off and had to turn it on again using one hand. Sounds like a regional/carrier-specific thing. I recall that in the early days, carriers could disable hotspot functionality on their network. I hear hotspot functionality is pretty broken on iOS 26 though.

It sure what’s going on my side. Hotspot turns off almost as soon as there is no usage. I wonder if there is a way to debug that.

Just checked I’m on iOS 18.2.

GP’s behavior is what I see, it usually doesn’t shut itself off while I’m connected but once it’s on I have to act fast to get connected or it’ll shut itself off in a minute or two. And if I disconnect for a second, it’ll be off and I have to turn it on again. Really annoying the rare times I use it.

Been like this many versions, but dunno if it does it with the latest.

The new guy they brought in has already jumped ship twice in the last 6 months, 16y at Google, then to Microsoft in 06/25 and now to Apple.

Was the MS gig so bad?

I worked with JG. He was a good guy. Got no idea what happened at Apple, but I have nothing but good feelings from when I knew him 25 years ago.

Any other Indians/Hindi-speakers here think that "giannandrea" has an uncanny association with "gyanendra"?

If it's not a new color, or a new switch between stainless, aluminum, or titanium, Apple seems unable to manage their tech stack.

So what is going on here? The reason is definitely not that Apple couldn't even train a small local LLM to power Siri, right?

Even with ChatGPT in play it’s not very good.

ChatGPT does not help with the system integration it's just an afterthought.

It could potentially help tremendously but for that they would need to understand the usefulness of LLMs and tool usage.

"couldnt even" is a high bar. it is an unsolved problem to make small models (truly, no bullshit) perform at human intelligence level than to make large models do the same. the bar JG had to pass was a bit lower than that, but Apple's marketing team unfortunately overpromised.

If they let you use siri to change settings it would be very useful. Instead I have to search fro hard to find options.

Who? Maybe that was the problem.

What did he even do for Apple's AI strategy for 7 years?

Apple is still far behind in doing anything useful with AI.

He did nothing, or net-negative. Same as Google; it was totally unclear how this guy got promoted to the level of power he had based on his history.

[Now I remember- he came in with the metaweb acquisition at a time when search was going all-in on knowledge graphs and semantics]

Even if you have all the money in the world, it's still crucial to put the right people in the right places.

When is Tim Apple retiring? Put an engineer in charge so they can fix Apple's rotting software.

Apple have said 2026 they'll be focusing only on quality improvements for software, I believe.

Sounds like infrastructure week.

Snow Leopard predates infrastructure week by a decade.

This new guy is from Microsoft, who have enshittified every product they own with AI, ads, zero privacy data exfiltration, cloud everything, no security framework whatsoever, and the like.

I hope they don’t do anything remotely like that at Apple.

I am completely okay with the Apple approach to date (privacy and late mover cost advantage over progress and burning money/raising prices).

At this point, their investment to ship a better Siri is nearly zero if they take an open source model and run it on the device. Did John really mishandle it, or did he realise this and decide not to burn $BILS of cash and play the long game instead?

I use Windows every day and see no AI anywhere. It's trivial to turn off (thankfully) and we wouldn't even hear about it if there wasn't an outrage industry around Microsoft.

Aside from all the 365 subscription prices turning into “+ Copilot” editions and silently going up in price like 20%, that you then have to access hidden flows to opt-out of, right?

Perhaps you are not getting it rammed down your throat because you’re not a business user? On personal editions one area where AI has been a failure is taking over the search bar, but you’re right, you can disable it.

He is a researcher, so I would keep a bit of hope he is not the same as the regular business side of msft.

He was at Microsoft for a few months, and Google for 16 years before that.

I worked pretty closely with him and his team for a bit at Google, and he seemed like a great human being, in addition to being a great engineer. I wouldn't read too much into a few-month stint at Microsoft.

Wow, come to think of it, Siri failed; ChatGPT completely eclipsed the tool.

Imagine an alternate reality where companies can do things like create voice assistants without the absolute, unquestionable requirement to not only be profitable, but to have infinite compounding growth forever.

We'd have working voice assistants by now. We're held up by the incessant need to game "engagement" and seek rent.

In reality users just want a goddamn voice interface to their phone. Set a timer, remind me of x next time I'm at location y. Turn on the lights. Set home air conditioning to 72.

Simple, trivial bullshit that has absolutely no monetizable worth. Because it's not profitable enough it's not worth developing at all. I'm half convinced the only reason siri and google assistant even still exist is solely and exclusively because the "other guy" has it.

People argue innovation is impossible without capitalism. I argue innovation is impossible with capitalism. If your idea isn't profitable enough it's not worth any amount of investment regardless of how beneficial the idea might be.

We'd have working voice assistants if it wasn't for Apple Monopoly banning all apps that are "competition to Siri" and "asking for too many permissions" because sandbox is not compatible with system integration.

look if you don't care about privacy, just buy a google phone

If Apple can't offer competitive APIs that maintain privacy, then I don't trust them to handle my data in the first place.

Siri (Apple) and Alexa (Amazon) both has massive wiffs on AI

IMO the problem is he was going for "real AI" instead of "fake it until you make it" AI.

Then LLMs came and it still wasn't "real enough."

But those stock options and benefits were excellent… /s

Honestly he’s had one hell of a career. Even if Siri sucked.

Full disclosure: I've known jg since 1986. I have no insight into the Apple goings on, but the story that "he's the guy that made Siri suck" sounds very very unlikely to me.

He's not the guy who made it awesome, that much is known.

Yeah, not attributing it to him, just his lack of being able to do anything with it. Could have been Apple Politics. Could have been a number of things.

Still. Idle hands, he should get back on that horse if he can. Go do more stuff.

Where is this "real AI" you speak of?

No one dares to question Apple’s culture. Perhaps something is rotten inside. The same people who milked iPhone for 14 years. But they got Vision Pro a full year after Meta proved that’s a dead end. What a joke of corporate leadership.

The Vision Pro release is a complete joke. If Meta can't make it work for under 1K it's definitely not going to work if you only offer a slighter better product for 3,5K.

I believe that they are so arrogant that they think Meta just suck when in fact it is just a product category still looking for a valuable use case to the general public.

They market it for watching movies but most peoples already hate using headphones for too long and those are pretty comfortable nowadays.

i wonder if this is related to the new appletv and speakers being apparently delayed

What a ducking surprise

Why does the title of this post keep changing? I think this is at least the third iteration of it now. I don't understand the HN obsession with titles. Now half the comments don't even make sense or people wonder why they keep talking about Siri.

"Hey Siri, stop playback"

...

Siri disappears and song continues playing

...

"Hey Siri, stop playback"

Songs stops playing.

interesting

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46114144

Siri is doomed by Apple global strategy. Even if they really make it to work, it would work only in a few selected languages which is a parody of AI these days. They are living in 90s when only a few languages were important

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