I find this all quite baffling.
I’m pretty sure I could knock up a decent Siri clone with got4o-mini, because I already did a bootleg Alexa to power our smart home stuff after Amazon removed the privacy controls. The only hard bit was the wake word.
Siri is currently so terrible that even something like Mistral 8b could do a decent job. Whey don’t they just run something like that on their own servers instead?
I’m not surprised that Apple has been struggling to integrate LLMs. By their very stochastic nature they go against Apple’s philosophy of total vertical control of every aspect of their products. There’s no way to guarantee that an LLM will do anything and so they would be ceding control of the user experience to a random number generator.
There are rumors around that Apple is trying to buy perplexity which makes no sense to me.
Perplexity doesn’t have their own foundation model they just wrap existing models so what good are they? They should buy Mistral instead.
Hope they can address the fact that many devices we use for Siri are low powered and it’s not practical to put expensive chips in them, such as our Homepods.
I’m sure that has something to do with why something like OpenAI looks attractive. The situation where they would want to run own AI is to run locally on device.
Downloaded Apple intelligence and realised I was probably never going to use it. Fully disabled. Siri has been disabled since day 1 (moved over from Android to the iPhone 15 pro max)
I would much rather see small individual uses of AI using the quite powerful hardware than another chatbot.
Photo editing for example - the new AI feature to remove an object (like a random person behind you in a selfie) works great. Give us more upgrades like that with real world uses ! I don't care about some giant all encompassing Siri. I don't even like talking to my phone in general.
Siri is basically only good for checking the weather, starting a timer and basic maths.
It messes up half the tasks I ask of it:
Alarm rings: "Hey siri, stop" -> "Which alarm would you like me to delete?"
"Hey siri how far is from the bottom of [hiking trail] to the top?" "It'll take you x hours to walk from your location to the trail.".
"Hey siri call Jeff" [Calls different person]
It always keeps listening until I tell it to go away. Feel free to reply with your examples of not being taken Sirisly.
This is a rare and fantastic grilling of Apple by a journalist over Siri, with Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak. It's a masterpiece.
I don't use Siri much, but I have noticed sometime over the last few months a problem in something that Siri uses. That's the voice dictation. I use it all the time on iPad to enter search terms.
So for instance if I wanted information on public transit options in London I'd tap the search bar in Safari, tap the mic icon, and say "Public transit options in London" and that used to work pretty much all the time. It would even work if I had a loud TV on or loud music on, and it was great about realizing when I'd stopped speaking and automatically starting the search.
Lately it has tended to cut off early, so I only get "Public transit options" entered. I can get it to work if I try again and say each word very loud and with a distinct short gap between the words.
My understanding is that modern dictation systems make heavy use of deep learning so I'd expect it shares from underlying technology with Siri. I wonder if there is a problem with that underlying technology?
It’s getting kind of silly that we don’t have AI on phones in a usable way.
My wishlist:
Let me talk to AI about anything on my screen. Hey AI why did this guy email me? Hey AI what’s this webpage about? Etc
AI designs the UI on the fly depending on the task I’m doing. No more specific apps? just a fluid interface for whatever I need.
Leave AI in listening or video mode and ask about my environment or have a conversation.
Maybe they should just start putting 16gb ram in iPhones from now on and make their local inference job so much easier.
They don't need Anthropic or OpenAI. Literally just go to ollama.com and throw a dart at a random model. That will be better than whatever they are doing now.
I would've held off on buying a new phone another year (AT LEAST) had I known all that Apple Intelligence hype was just hype.
IMO Apple's play here is to be the host that runs something like mcp servers and allows/encourages App devs to allow users to ask Siri to make requests that utilize their apps.
Then we can interact with multiple apps all via Siri and have them work together. To me that's a huge win.
If Apple still had “courage”, they’d give up on AI and release a truly revolutionary “average phone”. A phone stripped of social media apps and features, with only access to music, mapping and messaging apps.
I wish it could be on device though. I’d upgrade my phone for that.
I truly do not understand how the same company that can create a truly innovative and incredible bit of hardware like the Vision Pro can also let Siri stagnate for almost its entire life.
Why not use one of the open source models?
Go with anthropic
Is it not uncharactaristic that they're talking sbout this in public?
And here's me trying to figure out what I would need AI on a phone. Apps are going to phone home and use their own AI, not Apple's. I don't need an AI to set a timer, search Google, or add to my calendar. If I write anything, I do it on my main machine.
Really wish this would be optional, but you know it won't be.
I understand apple's strategy. If they had really good AI, their phones and watches would be reduced to a microphone and speaker. No more advantage. So they stick to crappy AI that forces users to tap on their phone frustratingly instead. Their idea about running openAI models is meant to make people disable AI features altogether. Brilliant strategy (/s)
At this point, just about anything Apple can do will be way way way better than the absolute turd that is Siri. (It was only impressive 15 years ago).
Apple's AI strategy has seriously hurt their reputation. I'd love to be a fly on the wall where they discussed a strategy that amounted to "forget using the most basic LLM to understand combinations of commands like, stop all the timers and just keep the one that has about four minutes left... or turn on the lights in x, y, z room and turn off the fans around the house. let's just try to invent a completely new wheel that will get us bogged down in tech hell for years never making any progress"
They could've just improved the thing probably 99% of people use Siri for (Music, Home, Timers, Weather, Sports Scores) without developing any new tech or trying to reinvent any wheel. And in the background, continue to iterate in secret like they do best. Instead they have zero to show for two years since good LLMs have been out.
Even my son suggested things like "I wish your phone had ChatGPT and you could ask it to organize all your apps into folders" – we can all come up with really basic things they could've done so easily, with privacy built in.