- Apple’s progress with Siri and artificial intelligence has been slow, and features promised in June remain delayed.
- At a Siri team meeting, senior director Robby Walker acknowledged the frustration within the team, describing the delays as “ugly.”
- Features like Siri understanding personal context and taking action based on a user’s screen are still not ready and may not make it into iOS 19.
- Challenges include quality issues that caused these features to malfunction up to a third of the time and conflicts with Apple’s marketing division over showcasing incomplete features.
- Apple has withdrawn related advertisements and added disclaimers on its website, citing extended development times.
- Senior executives, including Craig Federighi and John Giannandrea, are reportedly taking personal accountability for the delays.
- Walker emphasized that the team’s work is impressive and that the delayed features will be released once they meet Apple’s standards.
- Take screenshot of screen
- Send screenshot to Claude 3.7 or any other decent chatbot. Even GPT-3 is light years smarter than current Siri, but I don’t know it if can analyze images
- Run Claude’s response through a text-to-Siri-speech layer
There, now Siri can see your screen. Why can’t Apple accomplish this? Why are megacorps so inept?
This whole thing is a textbook example of how bad shady marketing today and can really cause you a lot of pain tomorrow. If Apple had not been so quick to let PR write checks their ass was not ready to cash the conversation around Siri would still just be the casual jokes about it sucking, and not more serious public blackeyes.
“Taking personal accountablility”, but not a paycheck.
Ok… this is what it is I suppose, every business wants to be on the AI train, but, this seems like an opportunity to make the next iPhone, or at least a version of it, without AI as a selling point.
I’d be very happy indeed to have an option that was entirely devoid of, and incompatible with, any form of AI and I know I’m not alone in that. Sell it as prioritizing privacy or respecting consumers desire to opt out, whatever the marketing folks come up with. But that would be my next phone in a heartbeat.
That is not going to happen.
Apple Intelligence hasn’t been much better than old Siri on unsupported devices.
For a third of the time, she has a hard time recognizing the trigger word the first time (usually “Siri” rather than “Hey Siri”), and not perform my commands when all I want her to do is act as a voice-activated light switch.
What exactly is the trillion dollar company struggling with here?
Interesting timing, where I’m seeing the opposite. All my Amazon devices suddenly can’t turn on a simple light switch, and one appears to have somehow factory reset.
However Siri works perfectly. I use a button rather than wake word, but then it dies actually turn on my light
It’s been theorized that Amazon is progressively making all Alexa devices worse so they can sell you on a subscription based AI version.
I can careless for Ai Siri. There’s no real need. I barely use Siri anyways.
I think the phrase is “I couldn’t care less”.
I know the phrase is “I couldn’t care less”
I only use it for voice controls.
AI isn’t the answer. Plain and simple.
AI can make me a video of the brave little toaster suplexing Putin, to sit on that kind of power is silly.
LLMs aren’t the answer. *
LLMs are the question, “no” is the answer.
they should embrace it and be the anti AI tech giant
Hell, if they genuinely do that, I might even consider switching sides.
I don’t fucking want AI in my phone, so take it out and be done with it.
You’ve had AI on your phone for ages. All your pictures are “AI” touched. And no you don’t want the raw output cameras in phones are not that good.
Right? Hink of everything else I can do with that space and computing power. Not to mention the fuckin environmental devastation we’d curb.
Siri has run locally since iOS 15
A while ago I set up a Siri shortcut that opens ChatGPT in voice mode. Now I can just say “hey siri, ask the demon” and in a moment start talking to ChatGPT with no further commands and zero buttons pressed throughout. It answers in voice mode.
This is pretty useful for things like doing units conversions while my hands are sticky during cooking, or just doing simple information lookups while my hands are busy. I use ChatGPT responsibly, never trusting it for things that aren’t one-dimensional information retrievals and summarization. It works great for me for like 50-60% of the things I used to Google. Internet search is, once again, just for finding websites, like it should be.
What’s my point? We don’t need Siri Apple Intelligence to ship. There’s already something better. And it runs on my iPhone 14, which isn’t even compatible with Apple Flatulence.
I’ve never used Apple intelligence and Siri alone has done a fine job for unit conversions, info lookups, and most any other things. No need to fire up chat GPT for those basic uses
Apple fucked up no doubt. Given how hard they pushed AI as a key feature of IPhone 16 I wouldn’t be surprised if they get a class action lawsuit for this.
But it’s also interesting to read a few things from the article that makes me hopeful for when Apple finally releases the features:
- Let’s be honest, AI by Google, MS is shit right now. They are claiming the same promises which most of the time don’t work, but Apple chose to delay release until they could get better consistency.
- The executives are taking personal responsibility? I hope that’s the case and no developers are thrown under the bus for this. I’ve rarely seen an article mention personal executive responsibility from a tech firm for delays and qa issues.
- I hope marketing gets reigned in so they won’t push other unready features the next few years.
- I hope Apple releases some open source AI tooling to re-gain good will. Would love to see some more competition in the AI space.
I hope Apple releases some open source AI tooling to re-gain good will. Would love to see some more competition in the AI space.
That’s literally never going to happen. Closed-source proprietary stuff is their MO.
Anyone who isn’t completely high from huffing AI brainfarts saw this coming.
AI is overrated in almost every implementation that isn’t scientific research. The buzzword stock hype machine fake growth cycles are going to kill the tech industry.
these features to malfunction up to a third of the time
That’s “ai” for you lol
Dropping rapidly, and using reasoning models can solve most of it today.
Features like Siri understanding personal context and taking action based on a user’s screen are still not ready and may not make it into iOS 19.
Tech companies not understanding exponential complexity is one of the funnier things to come out of recent years.
