- 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- Apple has withdrawn related advertisements and added disclaimers on its website, citing extended development times.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.
does anyone buy a product for AI or Assistant features?
Some people bought scam pins/portable assistant that is actually a butchered phone thing, so, yeah.
Tech bros and “influencers” don’t count. We’re talking about real people. All of those devices failed because no one other than those seeking to ride the bleeding edge of technology actually are interested. The most anyone want Siri or Google Assistant to do is set alarms, set appointments, and pick-up/hang-up the phone when you’re on speaker. Sometimes it’s nice to ask it to do a search but the original versions of these did that fine until they started “improving” them with “AI”.
A) No executives anywhere are taking personal accountability for anything
B) I upgraded from the 12 to the 16 for Apple Intelligence and I have yet to see it offer value. A substantial portion of hey Siri voice requests return with “I’m sorry I didn’t get that” even when using the voice transcription feature gets the words right
Marketing over promising and making it developments problem. A tale as old as time.
Siri is so useless. All these years and I use her to basically set timers and reminders.
Sure, here’s a station just for you.
I’ve added limes to the grocery list
Terrible voice assistant. I preferred Google assistant, but even that is becoming slow.
They neutered Google Assistant because it was costing too much money. Now it’s ass.
They’re likely also winding down development in favour of their new LLM, which certainly isn’t going to help matters.
- 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 is the most defensible point. Designing APIs to determine what content on your screen is ok to send to a third party (Apple offers ChatGPT integration) is a decent amount of work.
Spend 5 minutes creating a bash script
Spend 5 billion dollars on an overly complicated summarizer
Why the fuck would I wanna write bash
Yeah let’s keep it POSIX
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.
‘It’s still in development’ doesn’t strike me as “dire.”
Dire as in, it was supposed to ship 6 months ago as the highlight of the iPhone 16 series.
Dear god!! The end is nigh!!
When it falls into false advertising in every market that the iPhone is sold, it is.
“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.
I can run an LLM on a phone from before the AI craze, it would be slow but it would still run. You can’t really make a phone that isn’t compatible with AI.
No, I suppose not, but just like home brew software apple can put up walls.
I guess I just mean it would be nice to be able to opt out. If I want to run an AI app, I can always set up a docker or something and run it for myself. I think at this point, I’ve just got AI fatigue ¯_(ツ)_/¯
That is not going to happen.
Def not, but I’ll keep day dreaming :)
they should embrace it and be the anti AI tech giant
There stock would fall. I don’t care but investors would fear Apple is missing out on the future.
Hell, if they genuinely do that, I might even consider switching sides.
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?
Honestly I don’t really want a smart context-aware Siri, I just want something I can give simple, straightforward voice commands to, and get predictable, reliable results.
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.
Maybe, but they may lose more customers than they expect ….
There are privacy based devices for “always listening” voice assistants coming on strong
I already use Siri with a button for a lot. recently it seems able to recognize more of my smarthome devices and it will now prompt to forward more complex queries to ChatGPT
I’m really down to the intercom feature being the only reason to keep Alexa - I can’t control the devices my kids use at their mom’s house
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.
I was just fine without voice assistants and such. I especially don’t want LLMs being shoved down my throat at every turn.
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
This is what happens when you get pressure to please shareholders instead of customers. Historically, Apple has been good about revealing and delivering at the same time. But caught with their pants down during the AI hype, they fell into the trap so many other tech companies do. (Tesla is the undisputed heavyweight champ here)
Now that they’ve been burned by all this, here’s hoping they learn from it and return to form.
Historically, Apple has been good about revealing and delivering at the same time.
I’m not so sure about that. MobileMe, iTunes Ping, Vision Pro, and AirPower (their wireless charging pad) come to mind.
“You’re holding it wrong”
All of these things except the AirPad were released at about the same time they were announced. That’s what I was getting at.
While they did get released when they said, they didn’t get released in the state that was stated/indicated though.
I don’t think tech companies got caught with their pants down, they just hit the far end of the S curve regarding growth.
A lot of other “tech” companies in the past saw massive leaps in tech capabilities, then hit a wall once tech got to a certain level. Computing has hit its wall.
Apple has had so many misses recently. The current AI stuff, Vision Pro and maybe the 16e (too early to tell) form stuff that has released. But also this Siri AI, Air Power wireless charging pad, Apple Car project.
The Apple Watch is probably the last hit they had (the M series chips are good but not really new products, but maybe that’s me being overly harsh)
maybe that’s me being overly harsh
That’s actually probably fair: the M-chips are impressive, but they’re just an evolution that’s come out of the A-series stuff for their phones.
Which, of course, Apple bought and did not actually create. (I’ll let someone else argue the merits of buy vs do it yourself, especially when you give your aquisition endless R&D funds to make good shit.)
Well, first they’ll need to dig up and reanimate the corpse of Jobs. It’s amazing to see how they repeat the same failure track when he’s not pushing them to innovate. Even when he was (back) in the top dog seat, they still fell behind the competition and took forever to come up with features that other companies had been doing for years.
That’s always been their MO though. Take a recent innovation, and implement it better. That always means it’s later than tech from other places, but they get it “right”. Yes, I know that’s subjective.
In the case of AI, they scrambled to announce the feature with barely any work done on it. Had they kept mum about Apple Intelligence features for a year or so and then revealed, that would be the Apple way.
Also by all indications the current direction in Machine Learning (stuff like LLM) is a dead end which will never yield a “reasoning artificial intelligence” (even whilst quite a lot of other areas in ML have already reached sufficient capabilities in their domain to actually be useful) so there really isn’t any space to “implement (the main subdomain of ML that has been promoted as) AI better” IMHO.
It has its uses and who though we where anywhere near general intelligence. They are still making strides in LLM and it can still improve and is useful.
LLMs have already massively slowded down in terms of improvement from generation to generation and they’re not at all improving when it comes to logical errors (because they’re not structured for that at all - they’re massive statistical engines for language, not reasoning devices), so it seems unlikely that this stage of LLM evolution is the beginning of something massive, rather it looks like it is has gone as far as it can.
Not saying they’re useless, just not at the early days of a game changer technology.
When Apple got into personal computers, that tech was just about to go from a niche thing to mass adoption (from big machines in universities and very large companies to mass adoption by consumers and businesses) and 3 decades of advancing by leaps and bounds, and similarly Apple’s entrance into portable networked computing (with iPhones and iPads) pretty much turned the niche of ultra portable computing devices (such as the Palm Pilot) into an omnipresent mass market product.
A lot of that was getting in early and then ridding the wave of incremental tech improvements in those areas and related areas.
What exactly wave of tech improvements is there going to be from now onwards on LLMs given that they’ve barelly improved in terms of output and the only significant improvement in the last couple of years was Deepseek’s significant reduction in required computing power from “insane” to “massive”? Even some kind of amazing fall in required resources crossed to mass adoption of NPUs and TPUs would still not solve the reliabilty problems of the Technology and so far nobody has managed to crack that specific nut.
I was there when personal computing took off, when mobile networked personal computing took of, when the interned took of and so on, and what I’m seeing with LLMs now (not 2 years ago, but now) doesn’t at all feel like being at the brink of a revolution like with at least the personal computer and the internet (the smartphone looked more like a cool gimmick back then, to be honest).
Frankly the AI “Revolution” at this stage feels a lot more like the Bitcoin “Revolution” after a few years and it having been taken over by greed and speculation, than the Personal Computer Revolution or the Internet Revolution.
It probably doesn’t help that the tech in question, LLMs, are kinda shit, to put it plainly. You make the shiniest, most polished turd and it’s still just a turd. They are interesting and can be neat to play with but, they lack practical applications where cost to run them actually makes sense and benefits humanity. The iPod shuffle was more impactful, when measuring positive impact on people’s lives.
Take a recent innovation, and implement it better.
Ah, the mad rush to be Second Place.
AI isn’t the answer. Plain and simple.
What is the question. AI or LLM definitely has its uses and is here to stay. Is it the answer to everything, no.
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.
