[dylan-m]

You all are crazy. It desperately needs work, but Siri is the only mainstream assistant thing that meets users where they are instead of forcing them into whatever ecosystem it's attached to. Sure, Google Assistant's contextual awareness is super cool, but it only works if you use Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, Google Tasks, etc.

If we include the umbrella of machine learning stuff in iOS that gets branded "Siri", Siri finds useful connections between my firehose of email from Fastmail, my work Gmail, my text messages, and my Nextcloud calendar and contacts. Completely offline, without even mentioning iCloud.

The voice assistant is extremely clunky and I do hope they'll borrow from LLMs to improve it it, but they really are doing something right here with their modest approach, and "just use ChatGPT" isn't the solution people seem to think.

[gamblor956]

Siri only works for a few specific apps, most of which are from Apple, and only on Apple hardware.

It's not meaningfully better than Google's walled garden, and the voice assistant is so hilariously bad that it reduces the functionality of the stuff that Siri is actually adequate at handling.

[tredre3]

Google is hopeless at doing things offline. You can't even search for photos by their filename in the Android Google Photos app without enabling "backup to the cloud" first.

[fragmede]

> Siri is the only mainstream assistant thing that meets users where they are instead of forcing them into whatever ecosystem it's attached to

I must be missing your point, because afaik, Siri is only accessible via the Apple hardware ecosystem.

[tnmom]

Yeah, aka evidently the only place that has hardware & software teams good enough to do all this stuff on device.