alt Hacker NewsWas the failure really driven by privacy policy? Long term a privacy play is the right move. But right now, Siri's capabilities even underwhelm vis-a-vis a model with no understanding of user context that is just interpreting commands.
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It was driven by privacy and on device compute.
Anything you ask an Android device to do, or an Alexa device goes to their clouds to be 100% processed there.
Apple tried to make a small and focused interface that could do a limited set of things on device without going to the cloud to do it.
This was built around the idea of "Intents" and it only did the standard intents... and app developers were supposed to register and link into them.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/intents
Some of the things didn't really get fleshed out, some are "oh, that's something in there?" (Restaurant reservations? Ride Booking?) and feels more like the half baked mysql interfaces in php.
However, as part of privacy - you can create a note (and dictate it) without a data connection with Siri. Your "start workout" command doesn't leave your device.
Part of that is privacy. Part of that is that Apple was trying to minimize its cloud spend (on GCP or AWS) by keeping as much of that activity on device. It wasn't entirely on device, but a lot more of it is than what Android is... and Alexa is a speaker and microphone hooked up to AWS.
This was ok, kind of meh, but ok pre-ChatGPT. With ChatGPT the expectations changed and the architecture that Apple had was not something that could pivot to meeting those expectations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Intelligence
> Apple first implemented artificial intelligence features in its products with the release of Siri in the iPhone 4S in 2011.
> ...
> The rapid development of generative artificial intelligence and the release of ChatGPT in late 2022 reportedly blindsided Apple executives and forced the company to refocus its efforts on AI.
ChatGPT was as much a blindside to Apple as the iPhone was to Blackberry.
Siri could've done better but Apple is definitely taking big risks with their privacy play. They might just corner themselves.
Yeah, I'm not buying that either/or framing too
Agreed. I often have to verbally battle with Siri to do the most basic interaction. Siri recognizes all my words but misinterprets my intent and does something I didn’t want.