[apeace]

I've always thought it was Apple who dropped the ball with Siri.

When Siri came out in 2011 -- two years before Alexa -- all my coworkers and I had iPhones. I remember sitting in my office as people yelled at Siri all day trying to get her to be useful. "Hey Siri, what's the weather tomorrow? No... No SIRI, WHAT'S -- THE -- WEATHER -- TOMORROW!"

Even though it sucked, it seemed every hardcore Apple user was ready to jump onboard. Who cares if I'm in a crowded office with people trying to get work done while I spend 10x longer to perform a function in the noisiest possible way? I'm using this thing!!

The voice recognition has improved since then. But the functionality still sucks.

When I'm in private, there are a couple commands I'll use.

- "Hey Siri, call xyz" where xyz is someone in my contact list I have tested with Siri and is known to work. Not recommended to try without testing first.

- While cooking, "Hey Siri, set a timer for 10 minutes." Works great.

- While driving and navigating: "Hey Siri, take me to the nearest gas station." That one is pretty good, except the actual maps are not smart enough so sometimes you'll be turned around in the opposite direction you were going, since technically that's where the nearest gas station is.

I never understood why they couldn't make this tool better, even before LLMs and without any AI at all. Just hard-code a bunch of phrases, and ways to translate those phrases into some action.

"Hey Siri, how close is my UPS delivery?"

"Hey Siri, where can I get the best price on xyz cat food?"

"Hey Siri, what's my bank balance?"

"Hey Siri, how much is a Lyft to xyz?"

I bet if they had a single developer working on adding Siri commands full-time, they could announce something like 20-50 new Siri functions at every WWDC.

But it seems the goal now is just "Make it an LLM," instead of focusing on recognizing the task that the user wants to do, and connecting it to APIs that can do those tasks.

They could've dominated the "conversational system" market 13 years ago.

[noahtallen]

> But it seems the goal now is just "Make it an LLM," instead of focusing on recognizing the task that the user wants to do, and connecting it to APIs that can do those tasks.

I almost completely agreed with you, but this is not true! Apple is trying to solve the task & API problem with “task intents”, on which they go into more detail outside of the keynote: https://youtu.be/Lb89T7ybCBE

The new Siri models are trained on a large number of schemas. Apps can implement those schemas to say “I provide this action” (aka, the user intends to do this action). Siri can use the more advanced NLP that comes with GenAI to match what you say to a schema, and send that to an app.

These app intents are also available to spotlight and shortcuts, making them more powerful than just being Siri actions

[apeace]

Wow, that's great to hear! Excited to see what comes of it.

[Larrikin]

Non LLM conversational agents are a dead end. It's a waste of that one programmer's time now that we have an imperfect but pretty good solution. There is zero discoverability in voice commands and the best you'll do is remember 3 to 10 commands if you can't actually ask the agent anything. Better to have that person work on the team to improve the LLM.