I agree, a quote I heard from a former Apple employee from the onboarding materials: “Apple doesn’t do things first, we do things right.”

Generally agree, but Siri is out and is awful

Or in the case of the Touch Bar: they did it first and they did it wrong.

Siri is the very definition of a half-baked product.

Perhaps even quarter baked. and has been sitting there in the turned-off-oven for YEARS.

LLMs as they are now are not a drop-in replacement for what people use voice assistants for.

If you ask it a question it doesn't know the answer to, "I don't know" is better than making up a bullshit answer. That could be potentially hazardous at iPhone levels of scale, giving everyone easy access to what appears to be a very intelligent AI chatbot without them understanding that it shouldn't be relied on for a lot of information people will ask it.

They would get an immediate benefit from using an LLM for intent recognition - i.e. knowing that a user wants to search or set a timer, etc. Current Siri is really bad at this. I'm sure even a fine-tuned Llama 7B would be a massive improvement over Siri.

Agree that Siri isn't very good, and have been quite stagnant. It was released in 2011, that's 12 years ago!? Sure it's probably better now, but not 12 years of development better?

But, at the same time. ChatGPT and the likes have a very different failure mode, that feels even less Appley. Like saying actual fake stuff, or saying it understand that you want to turn the AC on when your son leaves school coming home - but then just not doing it, or doing something completely different. With current Siri the failings are at least very obvious…

Anecdotally, I feel like Siri was usable to send text messages and emails when it first came out. Now it struggles to do even that.

Siri was actually once a better product than it is now.

Just like the apple keyboard on iPhones.

You’re not imagining it; it is actually worse.

This is the first ever integration with iPhone after acquisition, it never got better than this https://youtu.be/SpGJNPShzRc?si=a5JgHgnK6Nf2p7BY

It is phone voice assistant and if you learn how to use it, it works great as intended. The problem is when you want too much interaction. ChatGPT can fake it, Siri - cant.

No half-baked products? Have you ever tried using the translation feature in the book app? That is the most infuriating, dumb piece of software I have seen in a long time.

They definitely missed the boat in my eyes. The speed at which others have been able to produce meaningful assistants with LLM is astonishing. Considering Apple also have an approach where they announce and release in November / early the following year, to have nothing revealed seems like a missed opportunity to me.

> They don't roll out half-baked products

You must be really young if you don't remember when they rolled out Apple Maps.

there was nothing wrong with apple maps, you were just holding it wrong

It’ll be something like Siri+… now only $9.99/month