Do people actually want this AI stuff in their phone? I don't want AI on my desktop/laptop computer and I don't want it on my phone either. None of my family or friends that I talk to seem to want it either.
From the number of people that do say "Hey, Siri", I'd suspect that people do want it. The concept is a nice one. Hands free. Remote control things with your voice. Super convenient by not having to have the device sitting next to you, just within earshot. Not even needing to be a mobile device. Just gizmo somewhere in the room. For non-technical people, it's utterly magic as a concept.
For technical people, it's a privacy nightmare because it doesn't really work as advertised on the tin. The only way they can get it semi working is by pushing the request to the mothership and do processing there rather than locally on device which means privacy is an option. Also, be technically minded, some people developing these systems make more money on data harvesting than any other service, so local only prevents them from that precious data. So the local processing isn't just a technical problem, but one that interferes with their core business. Of course, none of that is advertised on the tin
Maybe not?? Pretty much everyone that I've seen using Siri are most definitely not techy people. I'm far from the echo chamber SV bubble, so I spend more time around non-techy people than techy people.
Seeing how there are more non-techy than techy people, it feels like Apple has reached their target audience. If Apple depended solely on techy people, they'd need another bail out from MS or Googs to stay solvent.
I know a good number of people (mostly older) that don't seem to know that they can hold the power button for Siri. They'll hold their phone up to their face, say “hey siri”, wait for the reply, and then start talking.
I absolutely do. The Apple Intelligence pitch where you can ask it "what time is my mom landing?" and it knows who your mom is, can RAG messages and emails from her to obtain a flight number for today, and then use a tool to look it up and respond back is 100% where the future is heading.
I'm excited for it, and like Apple's high level privacy protecting narrative with the secure cluster stuff. We'll see if they're ever able to deliver.
Has the Pixel Gemini assistant gotten to that level? The Google Assistant was always better, and I know the switch to Gemini was a little rocky at first, but in theory it should be able to do that stuff, without all the privacy verbiage.
Not gonna get there with RAG based on vector spaces…. You need to integrate old-school A.I., database queries and the like for that to be reliable enough to not be a laughing stock. An LLM can use tools to set that up, but you need to build on existing technologies and face down the Gödel, Turing and scaling problems that come with it.
But how can you find out what time your mom texted you to meet? Surely, you don't mean open the text app, find the thread with your mom, and then scroll looking for it. Do you? Surely, the world couldn't function like that. We'd be staring at our screens all day doom scrolling in various apps looking for whatever info you needed. That's just not how the world works.
I think it is actually, because as everything transitions to apps and websites and smartphone, lately I feel like my phone is simply another organ located in my hands and I have to spend an unreasonable amount of time looking at it to get things done. I’d love to have something like Apple Glass powered by AI so I can get both hands freed up again.
It's only that way because you let it be. It is possible to operate in life without staring at a small screen all day. I hardly ever look at mine, and yet I'm a fully functioning person contributing to society in a positive manner. You just have to admit it is a problem, and take it from there
Disagree here. We could have very different sets of obligations in life coming from different sources, not all of which are under your control.
And the phone does consolidate many, many technologies that used to be disparate objects. Now, you can also live life without a camera, CD player or walkman, cookbooks, planner/calendar (i actually still use a paper one in addition to calendar/reminder apps), and letters coming in the mail, sure. But I don’t think you’ll get fat proposing that to everyone, and these are just a few examples. Not everyone is going to want to live a life of pure asceticism.
I think back on my parents’ stacks of mail and realize that searchable email is way better than that.
I also just bought concert tickets for a few shows in the summer. Yes, there is a paper ticket option, that you pay to have mailed to you. Have you ever lost a paper ticket before, or tried reselling them? Much easier to deal with with the AXS app.
A buddy visited a while back and getting him a transit card without using the smartphone option took about 30 minutes.
I think it’s just that after having centralized so many things into one device, there’s a new step function horizon to cross to make it more effective to use or come up with a new form factor.
Copilot as a sort of unobtrusive popup window on my PC, as long as it remains an isolated app without roots into the OS, used as a more precise search engine available with a keyboard shortcut while coding on Windows has been surprisingly useful for learning etc.
Anything more ingrained or trying to be too clever or invasive, not at all. Microsoft has a funny example here, as what I describe is the consumer Copilot app. The Microsoft 365 Copilot experience seems the worst extreme, muddling the product, injecting itself across domains for dubious benefit. The rating in the app store of both of these 2 apps reflects this divergence.
On mobile, I could see the potential as a substitute for search engines, with pros and cons for it's style of information retrieval. Beyond that it's stretching the use case of LLMS
Most “normies” have no idea what it can or cannot do, but they’ve heard at least the one buzzword and probably seen an ad for “Apple Intelligence.” Maybe had a laugh at the idea of an “AI boy/girlfriend” and would be curious to check it out.
I could be wrong of course, but my intuition is that only that tiny fraction of the population already following LLMs would potentially not want AI Stuff on their phones.
Regardless, I can imagine how rage inducing it is for the Apple CEO to use Siri, then immediately after use ChatGPT Advanced Voice mode. Its like what Siri should be, regardless if this much or that much people will use it.
If Apple made a voice mode as advance as ChatGPT, and no one used it, then you can throw away Siri all together (and i'd assume Apple has the data that shows people actually use the Siri)
A lot of the Apple Intelligence stuff seems like a waste of space. But having some personal LLM with context over my phone and life? That sounds pretty cool.
This is one reason I've started using Google's AI app more. It's integrated with my calendar and my email, so I can ask it "Have I booked a hotel for that conference in March" and it'll check my calendar for the conference dates then search my email for a hotel reservation around those dates.
Small tasks like that are things I spend a few minutes on several times per week and it's nice to have a contextual AI assistant that can handle those types of things.
