They've been vastly ahead of everyone else with things like text OCR, image element recognition / extraction, microphone noise suppression, etc.
iPhones have had these features 2-5 years before Android did.
People should not be using their phones while driving anyways. My iPhone disables all notifications, except for Find My notifications, while driving. Bluetooth speaker calls are an exception.
I think there's even better models now but Whisper still works fine for me. And there's a big ecosystem around it.
apple is so hit or miss.
I think the image ocr is great and usable. I can take a picture of a phone number and dial it.
but trying to edit a text field is such a nightmare.
(try to change "this if good" to "this is good" on iphone with your fingers is non-apple cumbersome)
"first" isn't always more important than "best". Apple has historically been ok with not being first, as long as it was either best or very obviously "much better". It always, well, USED TO focus on best. It has lost its way in that lately.
The only thing that Apple is really behind on is shoving the word (word?) "AI" in your face at every moment when ML has been silently running in many parts of their platforms well before ChatGPT.
Sure we can argue about Siri all day long and some of that is warranted but even the more advanced voice assistants are still largely used for the basics.
I am just hoping that this bubble pops or the marketing turns around before Apple feels "forced" to do a copilot or recall like disaster.
LLM tech isn't going away and it shouldn't, it has its valid use cases. But we will be much better when it finally goes back into the background like ML always was.
- truck drivers that are driving for hours.
- commuters driving to work
- ANYONE with a homepod at home that likes to do things hands free (cooking, dishes, etc).
- ANYONE with airpods in their ears that is not in an awkward social setting (bicycle, walking alone on the sidewalk, on a trail, etc)
every one of these interaction modes benefits from a smart siri.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Why can’t I have a siri that can intelligently do multi step actions for me? “siri please add milk and eggs to my Target order. Also let my wife know that i’ll pick up the order on my way home from work. Lastly, we’re hosting some friends for dinner this weekend. I’m thinking Italian. Can you suggest 5 recipes i might like? [siri sends me the recipes ASYNC after a web search]”
All of this is TECHNICALLY possible. There’s no reason apple couldn’t build out, or work with, various retailers to create useful MCP-like integrations into siri. Just omit dangerous or destructive actions and require the user to manually confirm or perform those actions. Having an LLM add/remove items in my cart is not dangerous. Importantly, siri should be able to do some tasks for me in the background. Like on my mac…i’m able to launch Cursor and have it work in agent mode to implement some small feature in my project, while i do something else on my computer. Why must i stare at my phone while siri “thinks” and replies with something stupid lol. Similarly, why can’t my phone draft a reply to an email ASYNC and let me review it later at my leisure? Everything about siri is so synchronous. It sucks.
It’s just soooo sooo bad when you consider how good it could be. I think we’re just conditioned to expect it to suck. It doesn’t need to.
I have a several homepods, and it does what I ask it to do. This includes being the hub of all of my home automation.
Yes there are areas it can improve but I think the important question is how much use would those things actually get vs making a cool announcement, a fun party trick, and then never used again.
We have also seen the failures that have been done by trying to treat LLM as a magic box that can just do things for you so while these things are "Technically" possible they are far from being reliable.
Woah woah woah, surely you’re not suggesting that you, a user, should have some agency over how you interact with a store?
No, no, you’re not getting off that easy. They’ll want you to use Terry, the Target-AI, through the target app.
We are looking forward to being able to ask Siri to pipe some speech through to an AI
To be fair, they did announce flashy AI features. They just didn't deliver them after people bought the products.
I've been reading about possible class action lawsuits and even the government intervening for false advertisement.
For me, the Copilot key outputs the chord "Win (Left) + Shift (Left) + F23". I remapped it to "Ctrl (Right)" and it's functioning as it should.