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.