Even if all it did was improve Siri’s capability to understand requests and add the ability to ask clarifying questions with no other functional improvements, it’d make Siri vastly more useful.

"A competent Siri."

This, but it is really exciting because for the first time, you can just tell your computer what to do. Not just a given set of tasks, but e.g. "go to my gym and book a slot with my personal trainer"; "contact Shauna and set up a meeting to talk about X, then book me tickets to get there".

Think about how much monkey-work we all do with our smartphones. We might look back in 10 years and laugh at the idea that we had to press buttons all the time.

I had this 15 years ago when my blackberry had a keyboard on it. It had buttons, and when you press them it makes the character you commanded go onto the screen. If they'd just put buttons on the phone instead of trying to draw a fake one on the screen you wouldn't need a statistical model to make the keyboard work

I can type significantly faster with GBoard, swipe or not, than I could on any physical phone keyboard ever. Blackberries, the G1, Droid OG. No way I'd ever take those over GBoard.

But iOS users don't really know what they're missing from GBoard, so.

I haven't owned an iPhone since the iPhone 4, I lean really heavily on autocorrect on my Pixel (is that using Gboard?). It's just an infuriating experience to me compared to physical buttons. I probably hit the backspace key at least three times as often and often when I try to type a backspace instead it comes out as an "l", "m", ".", or enter.

Most of the time I just wish I could plug my full sized keyboard into the phone, that would fix it completely most of the time (except, obviously, when I'm not near my desk).

An ideal compromise would be physical buttons on the device for when it's necessary and the ability to easily use my workstation's external keyboard (dock + switch maybe?) the rest of the time.

EDIT: Now that I think of it.. let me plug in a mouse too and give me a real OS (maybe in a container like you get on a Chromebook) and i can just replace my workstation with the docked phone. But then I would buy only half as many computers and wouldn't need all that GPU compute to train a bunch of statistical models so I guess that doesn't work for the computer companies.

I knew halfway through your comment that I was going to end up agreeing with where you were going. We're so close to having a decent Android tablet, with maybe a new Firefox for tablets, with USB-C DP out. 90% of the time I also would rather just be on a better device.

I'm sad there isn't more built around Android's AVF. I thought for sure, by now, we were going to have "Linux on Android" ala Crostini.

You can indeed just plug in your full size keyboard into your phone! You may need a USB A to C adapter, but your phone will happily support an external keyboard

Apple already has transformer based text prediction and a model for power management.

How does "generative AI" help ?

That's it. So they're not behind, they're already there.