It has to be evident to Apple that Siri needs dramatic changes. They keep building hardware that needs robust voice support.

I would not be so sure, mainly because of ecosystem lock. I sincerely doubt a double-digit percentage of Apple employees have touched and android phone or used OpenAI APIs. Big problem with ecosystems is you don’t know what you’re missing.

> I sincerely doubt a double-digit percentage of Apple employees have touched and android phone or used OpenAI APIs

I strongly doubt you're right. Apple is full of geeks; just because they tend to be tight-lipped doesn't mean they aren't paying attention to all the same stuff we are.

Double digit? I live walking distance to Apple HQ and there’s not exactly a lot of people in the shops and cafes with Android phones and you practically never see someone pulling out Google pay at a register.

Whereas I’d wager more than half of Google employees use iPhone, and a lot of Google staff work exclusively on iOS and Mac apps. Apple software runs in their hardware, period. It makes them too insular and unable to see their shortcomings.

The question was whether they’ve touched an Android phone, not whether they use them regularly.

Siri has been atrocious for going on a decade now. How much longer does it have to be terrible before we can say the people at Apple don't dogfood?

Hell it was bad as a voice assistant now it's gonna get lapped by other companies releasing personalized AI assistants.

I don’t use Android or OpenAI APIs, but I’ve been burnt frequently by Siri. You don’t have to use something better to know that it’s pretty bad.

Yes, but you don’t know how bad until you go from daily driving something that works and going back to garbage.

I switch between iPhone and Pixel and Apple/Google products and each has a lot going for it. But leaving Assistant for Siri is downright jarring.

Why Google made the shitshow that is Bard when they could have just iterated on Assistant I’ll never know. Such a solid product.

Siri is my alarm clock and my weather report, that's about it. Siri needs a lot of help.

You don’t need to even leave the ecosystem- Siri in 2023 is much worse than Siri in 2018 or so.

The regression in autocorrect is also nuts. It seems to aggressively modify grammar to the point of regularly changing the meaning of what I’m writing. It’s like a CS undergrad project where they went too hard on Markov chains.

It’s absolutely horrible- it will go back and modify correct words for whatever forsaken chain it decided it wants. I hate it.

I also have a fairly expansive vocabulary and talk about esoteric technical matters on my phone frequently. As far as I can tell Siri was trained on 8th-grade level text and constantly dumbs down my text and distorts the meaning.

Ugh, so true. I'm both a software developer and an avid reader of literature & philosophy, so my day to day word stream is both extremely varied, and frequently allusive with cryptic phrases and idioms. Not to mention the fact I do actually care about correct punctuation. Autocorrect and voice typing have long since given up on me.

You can help "a little bit" by adding some auto-replacements to the keyboard setup, but it doesn't work very well.

It would be really nice if there was a dictionary you could add technical words to.

if i understood the wwdc keynote correctly, they completely redid the text-to-speech, so this should actually be good now (maybe)

Yeah, but they’re so far behind even if they 10x Siri they’ve got nothing on OpenAI.

Then again.. Siri is all on device. I don’t want to send my voice anywhere

The current voice transcription engine at OpenAI is using Whisper-1[0] which is open source and runnable locally, if you wanted to keep it all on-device. I run it locally for various things and it works pretty damn well.

[0] https://github.com/openai/whisper

I have used whisper but it seems very picky about which device it will perform well on ("well" meaning quickly)

So is Google’s version and it’s a 100x difference, but agree re OpenAI.

> Siri is all on device.

No it’s not. Try doing literally anything without an active internet connection and she’ll say “I’m having trouble connecting”