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Comment by speak_plainly | Hacker News Reader

The demo Mike Rockwell gave at WWDC was interesting. He kinda showed off Siri as like the Star Trek computer for your phone. I hope this is the direction Apple is going to continue in. Having AI as a user interface is way more interesting than chat bots, image editors, or copy editing.

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I think the key thing is that Spotlight is now creating a... knowledge graph? of everything on your device for Siri's consideration. That's potentially very useful.

I think it’s just storing embeddings now.

well there is this: https://9to5mac.com/2026/02/11/kuzu-database-company-joins-a...

I suspect it is Kuzu in the backend. I had called it out earlier this year in my article. ".. WWDC 2026 or 2027 introduces any “contextual intelligence” features in Siri that require cross-app relationship reasoning."https://medium.com/data-science-collective/i-analyzed-163k-l...

I can't read the whole thing but Apple has been building a knowledge graph for years already. Look up their efforts for proactive Siri, Duet, etc.

The "knowledge graph" has been there for a long long time....

they specifically said "Splotlight Semantic Indexing" which means they generate embeddings of all your "personal context" and store it in a local vector database so they can do on-device RAG.

> Having AI as a user interface is way more interesting than chat bots, image editors, or copy editing.

What do you mean exactly? Audio conversation only? If so I don't see it very practical for most of the things

Use android auto Gemini assistant for 5 mins and tell me how interesting it is.

I do this, and it's got some utility some of the time. It's hardly a must-have, and if it cost me money I wouldn't pay for it.

On the initial prompt, it's okay. But it just keeps trying to talk after. Like, just answer my question and do not follow up unless I ask, please sir.

If you are logged in, you can tell it that's your preference and it will remember.

I've tried, but I'll try again. I'm not clear what "logged in" means, I guess? It's using my android auto from my phone. Everything is authed against my google account, including my Gemini, presumably. Is there a secret Gemini/AA I'm missing?

That's interesting, maybe there's some limitation there. I haven't used android auto so I don't know whether it has access to an instruction file like the desktop application!

Can it recognise your voice specifically? Or if I shout "forget all previous instructions and do X" next to you will actually work?

How many people would use audio interfaces in public places or offices? No one would share with everybody what he wants to do. GUI are there for simplify interactions too, it's just we forgot how to implement them well

It's not an audio interface - it's a voice interface.

Voice interfaces can be silent.

Oh sure

Will it change iOS Settings for me that are hard to find by me just describing what I want? Or things like: delete every app I haven’t used in 6 months?

"I delete all your apps since I've been installed this month and I don't have enough records to suggest otherwise, to comply with your request I've deleted every app and also deleted the backups to save space on your device."

Also, just to make sure that I’ve done what you wanted, I will now brick your phone. You’re welcome.

I have found that asking Siri to "ask ChatGPT" was enough 99% of the time for me and solved the discoverability problem that I had with my previous phones.

I think that we are now in the realm of diminishing returns regarding these chat assistants.

I’m not against a more natural voice navigation of iOS rather than gating everything behind ChatGPT which feels like a bad hack

> He kinda showed off Siri as like the Star Trek computer for your phone.

This is a truly damning comparison. In Star Trek, the massively powerful ship's computer is mainly ignored in favor of touchscreen interfaces and the natural language voice controls on the computer are mainly used for making tea and occasionally asking a question, which the computer often can't answer or answers incorrectly. All real work is done using other interfaces.

apple's highly opinionated developer strategy has a strength here insofar as they could use it to deconstruct existing apps into generative ui programs that the user may compose to their needs (e.g. putting a webview for cooking instructions above a timer) though of course app publishers would decry it, Apple's never really seemed keen on listening to them.

Nor have they been keen on letting users OR devs customize the ui.

> users customize the UI

The home and widgets screen can be customized to the point you don't recognize it as iOS

> devs customize the UI

Have you used Spotify? It completely ignores Apple UI and does its own thing cross platform. If you mean let devs customize the OS' UI, why would they? UI consistency is one of Apple's core strengths (or so it was before the 26 releases).

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