It's even more embarrassing when you look at the old Apple commercials introducing Siri up to 11 years ago, here's one from the rock when they introduced the iPhone 7:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhLGBY5_0zU

Anyone thats used Siri will watch that and laugh at how absurd it is that someone could get even one of those voice commands to work the first time. I'm surprised there hasn't been a class action lawsuit for false advertising. I can barely get it to start a timer on my apple watch sometimes.

Great ad though, Apple's always had it

Siri was better earlier on. In fact they were better before Apple bought them than ever after. And the primary reason is optimization of cost and scale.

And something similar is happening to GPT although not to that extent. Bing has gotten worse over time as they use a pipeline of models, where smaller models serve most common and easily predictable tokens, while the full model only handles the hard stuff. Except... you can't tell always what's hard stuff or not, so Bing serves useless distracted answers ignoring user context from time to time.

The best bit about that ad is that my homepod replied to every 'hey siri ...' with an error.

"Hey siri read me my last email" "I'm sorry I can't do that" "Hey siri list my reminders" "You can use the photos app to do that" "Hey siri show me my fashion line (?)" "You can try a search in your web browser"

A sad, but true, indictment. Siri on Apple Watch is brutally bad, it fails more than half the time when asking it to do something simple like setting a timer. I've disabled CarPlay because my car's voice control is much, much better than Siri.

It's not really "embarrassing". It's just old tech that was created in 2003 when the most common platform was Athlon XP CPUs, and that was okay-ish for its time, and it may take time to migrate current dataset.

It was released in 2010. And since the release they have upgraded to use neural networks.

It is embarrassing, Google Assistant is it's competitor.

> With ChatGPT it is now feeling like Siri the broken tricycle is being compared to a Lamborghini.

Just wait a bit.

“Hey Siri call X”

-“As an AI language learning model, I cannot know X from your contacts”

I know you say it as a joke, but the contact list could be a part of the hidden prompt, at least the names, so that it could then trigger an action with the proper name, which iOS would then understand.

Ideally the model would insert an API call into its output to fetch the contacts first, then make the call.

The scary part is asking the LLM to read your messages. Imagine someone texts you an LLM jailbreak. Siri might not be Siri anymore after it finishes reading.

It's odd to hear this. As an Android user I've always felt I'm missing out something really great, judging from the keynotes.

Gotta say I'm not especially impressed with my Google assistant on my pixel either. The hit rate makes it worthwhile only when I have to use it.

I use both regularly. Google assistant is far superior, coming in at annoyingly bad compared to Sirius infuriatingly bad.

I’ve used Android phones in the past, and Google’s tube person. Siri has IMO clearly gotten worse over time, on both my phone and my HomePods. I wouldn’t be surprised if Google is better at this point.

Google assistant is also getting worse over time

I got chatGPT hooked up to a voice interface on my iPhone[1], and this comparison is exactly what the difference feels like.

[1] https://theshamblog.com/chatgpt-on-an-iphone/