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Comment by HarHarVeryFunny | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like Siri - unable to control much of anything on the iPhone outside of reading/sending text messages and setting alarms.

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It also can initiate phone calls and play music.

And those are really the core use cases for AirPods, HomePods, and CarPlay, the contexts where a hands-free eyes-free interface is most useful.

And that’s ok. Those are core features of the phone that absolutely must work reliably and consistently. Far better to do a few important things really well than a hundred things execrably.

However the other day I asked the Gemini assistant on my phone to check the birthdays in my calendar, get all their dates, then make a graph of how many fall in each period with a 15-day moving average. It did everything as instructed including writing a python script to generate the graph, then discussed the results with me :)

I would expect Siri to be able to do anything on the iPhone that I can - change settings, report stats, kill/launch apps, etc.

It would be nice if it could control 3rd party apps too, like GMail, but being able to control the stuff that Apple themselves have built doesn't seem a lot to ask.

Apple is somewhat privacy focused, allegedly. I would imagine that letting an unpredictable LLM read whatever system data it wants is not something they want to partake in.

We all know they Apple lack the capability, not a choice.

Maybe there are different concerns now that Apple are apparently going to be using Google LLMs for Siri, although I'd have thought that any access to system settings or other iOS functionality would be via tool calls with user opt-in.

However, the original Siri, obtained from SRI ("Siri" = SRI) was pre-LLMs, and there should have been no more concern over accessing system settings or controlling apps than things like reading/sending messages. For some reason Apply completely dropped the ball with Siri; initially it was expected that they would expand it into revenue generating areas like restaurant reservations etc, but then nothing. I'm not sure what documentation exists, but even today it's not clear what Siri is actually capable of.

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