I hope they get rid of it completely. People on r/locallama and others have made much better assistants using GPT which use iOS APIs to control the phone. It's ridiculous that Apple still hasn't done anything useful regarding Siri.

I'd be (pleasantly) surprised; look at how long it takes them to allow system apps to get replaced with downloadable 3rd party.

And even then, the activation keyword is likely to be whatever Apple says. Similar logic as 3rd party keyboards, don't want user input to get stuck on even merely potentially untrustworthy or buggy code.

Correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t the activation word “special” in that it has to work in very low power states? I always assumed that is why the wake words are fixed, because said words need to “fit” within a very small power budget.

Could be — I've heard rumours along those lines, but none came with evidence.

https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/hey-siri (2017)

The rumors were true.

Thanks :)

That's not due to incompetence; that's due to not seeing any reason to do it.

I was not intending to imply otherwise.

It's been in an 'AI' rewrite for a while now. Pretty sure we'll see something next year.

It's been rewritten several times, people largely don't notice because they don't try using it in different languages. And of course because they want to seem savvy so they repeat impressions from other people's posts, not realizing those posts are years old.

For me fixed phrases would do it often, I use Siri mostly when driving, but keeps saying for almost any command/query: Sorry I cant do that while you are driving. (other main usecase is setting tea/cooking timers with hands full. this alone makes it pretty useful.)

I guess this won't change, because it is probably for legal reasons, to avoid being sued by some "I just dried my cat in the microwave" style genius after making a car accident (unrelated to Siri, but trying to shift the blame).

Adding support for smaller languages would be nice actually. When its reading out of Hungarian messages loud it sounds incredibly retarded. I always have a great time listening to those and trying to guess the message. :) It would be nice if I could send a message to my significant other about being stuck in traffic in Hungarian. (the iPhone keyboard already does pretty decent voice recognition in the language)