It's not Siri, but I'm surprised they didn't immediately kill a feature which alerted people with misleading headlines like "Luigi Mangione shoots himself" or that Rafael Nadal has come out as gay. An using the BBC's icon next to them!
Steve Jobs would've stormed into that team's office and dropped a grenade...
> The BBC first complained to the tech giant about its journalism being misrepresented in December but Apple did not respond until Monday [January 6], when it said it was working to clarify that summaries were AI-generated.
Apple recently announced they are disabling AI notification summaries for news apps in response to these high profile incidents. Seems like the entire feature should be rethought.
Yes Apple Intelligence enabled by default, but the notification summaries for news apps, one small part of the "suite", will be disabled (without a way to enable it) until further notice.
Not to defend the output--notification summaries clearly need work--but it used the BBC icon because it was summarizing the 20+ alerts sent to that user by the BBC app.
Siri has never been good at anything. Apple fans (other than me) gushed over it for years; now no one I know uses it or mentions it anymore. I like apple hardware but xcode, siri, icloud, apple mail; all terrible stuff imho. Siri wins though; it's even hard these days (with llms and other natural language processing) to make something so bad.
Siri works for the only thing I care about it for - hands free commands like setting timers, reminders, directions, choosing playlists and calling and messaging people - including replies.
Mostly when I’m driving or when I don’t have my phone on me and just using my Watch on cellular.
Yes I know what ChatGPT can do and I use it all of the time.
This is another major point about these AI products.
Not only do they barely work as far as accuracy and consistency, but even if they did, they aren’t being built to perform functions that are in demand.
They are solutions without pain points.
Why is someone going to use a hands-free assistant? Who would want to talk to a computer, which is an awkward thing to do?
Outside of accessibility reasons, the only reason to use something hands free is when…your hands aren’t free!
Cooking, driving, etc…that’s why timers and driving directions and putting on playlists is all anyone wants out of their voice assistant.
Apple might spend millions of dollars fixing the Super Bowl question only to find out that nobody actually wants to ask Siri that question, because I can just type that into Google or Wikipedia or something like that. Using my voice doesn’t save time or effort and it’s not discreet.
Even accessibility reasons are important by themselves. Almost everyone if they live long enough will lose some ability with their hands. My dad used Google’s voice search exclusively on his Android to look up YouTube videos. The first thing I installed on his iPhone 16 Plus was the Google app. He uses voice for everything that would require typing.
Google and search is a shit show. I’ve completely stopped using search for anything moderately complicated and have been using the paid version of ChatGPT since it integrated web search almost two years ago.
There is a lot of trivia that people want to use their voice for. Siri use to be good at that and gave you reliable answers by going directly to bespoke data sources for it.
It’s much easier to tell Siri “remind me to get the milk out of the back seat when I get out of the car” (or get in the car, get home, etc) than configure that manually.
That works as long as usually pair your phone with the car over Bluetooth.
Accessibility reasons are absolutely important, but the AI industry woudln't be worth the amount of moeny it is if the best application of the technology was accessibility.
I do it because setting a timer via the app is too much friction. On this current iPhone if I type “clock” into spotlight it actually takes a few seconds to return clock. Never happened on my 6s that phone was instant with spotlight.
I mean if that's not a pain point you encounter regularly because you have a wife or staff that takes care of it, good for you, but there's huge swaths of people for whom they don't have someone else to take care of that so it's a huge pain point that solving for hits. The problem is that there's not a lot of money in it because of the plethora of already existing content aka podcasts that are being give away for free so charging money for something that takes more effort is gonna be an uphill battle.
I am literally saying that cooking and driving is a pain point people encounter and solve through voice assistants, and that only a limited set of specific functions of the computing devices are needed during those times.
Voice activated features that are used in scenarios where your hands are available aren't very useful, especially if accuracy or level of control is poor.
So what I was saying specifically is that when people are cooking, they want to do things like set timers. When people are driving, they want to do things like get directions and play music/podcasts. But they don't really want to do all that much more than those things when they are already preoccupied with something else.
Other more complex functions that use AI aren't functions that people demand because they already have the option of interacting with their device in the first place. For example, users of the Apple notification summary AI feature don't seem particularly impressed because if your eyes are already on your device you can just read the notifications instead of a bad summary of the notifications.
IMO when tech companies design new features like this they operate in something of a bubble where they just assume that people will welcome more technology entering into very non-technical parts of their life. Solutions to problems that don't exist, more technology in places where it's not wanted, etc.
iCloud and Apple mail I use because my family is all in on Apple devices (teens!) so photo sync and music just work better with Apple, and the domain support for Apple mail is nice (outlook dropped that, Gmail costs a lot more, and my family can’t grok fastmail). But it’s death but a thousand cuts
I know they throw shade on interoperability but I wish they would just make iCloud for web sort of work. You can’t create Task lists, only tasks on existing lists, you can’t attach PDF to Notes, you can’t download or upload a folder. It’s endless. And iCloud sync on windows, ice pick to noggin…
I was just curious to compare plans, and Apple Music family is $17 while Spotify family is $20.
I know Spotify is “cooler” so worth the premium? I thought similar catalogs except now exclusive podcasts and maybe free audiobooks (are those good audiobooks or random authors?)
We actually usable Apple One, because spouse likes the News App, Kids like TV and Arcade and Fitness, so it’s not a bad value but it is hefty cost that keeps rising.
Spotify is more ubiquitous, so you can end up syncing to things like Playstations and stuff like that. Never really seen Apple music on non-apple devices.
Siri is great at setting reminders (I see it's my friends birthday tomorrow or next week and want to remember to call them, I immediately say "Hey Siri, remind me on Tuesday at 1pm to text ____ happy birthday'), good when I start a load of laundry in my apartment building's communal basement laundry room, "Hey Siri, set a timer for 46 minutes", good at "Hey Siri, turn the lights off everywhere" to get the lights off using Homekit (now called Home?) when I'm in bed. Siri is great at "Hey Siri next song" when I'm listening to my Spotify discover weekly and don't like what it's playing and that is way easier than pulling my phone out and tapping a button.
I would argue Humans are bad at Siri, more than Siri is bad at ____.
Siri is probably one of the most, rightfully, panned product of all time.
Even the day it was released it was panned because it was a gimped version of the app Apple had bought from the App Store.
I don’t think it’s reached parity with the original 3rd party Siri to date (I believe you could, for example, buy movie tickets with the original Siri, which the Apple Siri hasn't ever been capable of doing).
I prefer Siri to Google Assistant. The latter is the epitome of retardedness. At least when used in German. "Hey Google, new appointment tomorrow at 14 o'clock: Clean kitchen." This used to work fine 7 years ago. Today this creates an appointment at fucking 2 in the morning and asks you what you want to name it. With Siri I don't have any of these problems.
Apple seems to regularly have crappy software that you're de facto locked into if you want their hardware. I care so much more about software. There's no hardware benefit that would get me to use iTunes.
My impression is that siri was purchased because it was speech recognition and text to speech. It seems that understanding what is asked is too much to expect, it doesn't seem part of the design.
>What hadn’t occurred to me until now is that not only is OpenAI getting no money from Apple out of this arrangement, but that the net brand equity they’re getting from it might be negative. These Super Bowl and high school basketball queries are handled perfectly by ChatGPT when using it directly — but Siri’s attribution makes it look like ChatGPT is to blame for these utterly and at times laughably wrong bungled answers. As it stands, Apple is getting a scapegoat more than a partner out of this deal.
apple intelligence has always been a way to look good doing AI while not taking responsibility
It's bad because they're taking responsibility. Image Playground sucks because the training corpus consists only of imagery that they've created or otherwise have rights to. Siri sucks¹ because they're still handing most requests on-device, even for people who've turned on ChatGPT integration. What you're seeing is a company knowingly shedding short-term reputation points as they build a longer-term privacy-respecting solution.
¹ FWIW, Siri correctly answered all the "Who won Superbowl [n]" questions I threw at it just now on-device with iOS 18.3.
It’s not just Siri. With recent updates it has become obvious that iOS as a whole is getting worse. It’s not just the photos app in iOS 18 either - there are many annoyances all over the OS. As far as “intelligence” goes, I’ve also noticed that other ML powered features like typing and text prediction are worse on iOS today than in the past. Meanwhile support services like iCloud continue to have issues themselves - for example sync is completely broken on windows and has been this way for years.
I’m not sure what Apple is doing anymore. The hardware has been commoditized so if they aren’t competing on software, how are their outrageous margins defensible?
They aren’t even not the best. They’re well below par.
For example, Gruber shows that Apple Intelligence which uses ChatGPT, will give the wrong answers for questions which ChatGPT itself is right 100% of the time.
Siri is uniquely bad. If you have an iPhone, try asking it to pause and resume repeatedly. Sometimes it will say that it cannot do that (pause), but then the sound pauses anyway. Ditto with resuming.
I just did it while playing music on my phone and video playing in the background. I initiated with “Hey Siri”. I’m running the latest version of iOS.
But honestly, most of the time I either take an Airpod out of my ear, click on the AirPod stem, use my watch if I’m running to control volume, playback, or use the steering wheel controls on my car.
I was going to say similarly, what competitors are better. Alexa or Cortana or Hey Google? Google is maybe a little better but none are ChatGPT which is a different thing
I thought the whole point of Apple Intelligence was to have ChatGPT as backend for Siri, but this does not seem that?
Any tool that empowers the user can be misused. Apple is so terrified that you'll misuse their technology that they spend most of their engineering effort preventing you from getting things done with it. Hence, Siri.
Of course this is sustainable only as long as they have no competition. But even the post-Jobs Apple has a limited glide ratio. They will eventually find that the walls they've built are better at confining the company itself than at corraling its customers.
Why do we still hold Apple as a company in high regard when they remain incredibly inert, bowing to investor pressure to add generative AI features they are ill-equipped to handle as an institution, while prioritizing stock buybacks and dividends over innovating new products or developing a car or actually making a VR headset the market wants?
Last year they released AirPods Max 2, a 4 year old headphone at the time, with the only change being new colors and USB-c and the same price tag. If that’s not the perfect picture of Apple under Tim Cook.
It's so weird that some people see stock buybacks and dividends as a negative. I never understood that. In the long run, the most highly regarded companies prioritize shareholder returns. The idea that they should waste money on developing a car seems crazy.
> Why do we still hold Apple as a company in high regard […]
There is no "we". There's just a market (of products and of company shares) in which anyone can put their money where their preferences are and express their opinion.
I setup a couple of HomePods recently and smart switches despite warnings from friends that Siri wasn't as good as the other options.. and it's been frustrating. Maybe it's our accents but just basic stuff like asking for a timer often ends up in playing a song.
Can we please recognize that for all the people who call out Gruber for being an Apple shill (I don’t think he is) here he is being severely critical of Apple (which he does plenty often)?
Skimming the daringfireball archive (https://daringfireball.net/archive) there's around one post every couple months I would choose as an example, but... there is no way to quantify exactly how 'absurd' any specific example is, so it would be inherently a frustrating discussion.
Steve Jobs would've stormed into that team's office and dropped a grenade...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/07/apple-upd...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cge93de21n0o
> The BBC first complained to the tech giant about its journalism being misrepresented in December but Apple did not respond until Monday [January 6], when it said it was working to clarify that summaries were AI-generated.