alt Hacker NewsCan someone explain to me how this was allowed to happen? Wasn't Siri supposed to be the leading AI agent not ten years ago? How was there such a large disconnect at Apple between what Siri could do and what "real" AI was soon to be capable of?
Was this just a massive oversight at Apple? Were there not AI researchers at Apple sounding the alarm that they were way off with their technology and its capabilities? Wouldn't there be talk within the industry that this form of AI assistant would soon be looked at as useless?
Am I missing something?
Source: while I don’t have any experience with the inner workings of Siri, I have extensive experience with voice based automation with call centers (Amazon Connect) and Amazon Lex (the AWS version of Alexa).
Siri was never an “AI agent”, with intent based systems, you give the system phrases to match on (intents) and to fulfill an intent, all of the “slots” have to be fulfilled. For instance “I want to go from $source to $destination” and then the system calls an API.
There is no AI understanding - it’s a “1000 monkeys implementation”, you just start giving the system a bunch of variations and templates you want to match on in every single language you care about and match the intents to an API. That’s how Google and Alexa also worked pre LLM. They just had more monkeys dedicated to creating matching sentences.
Post LLM, you tell the LLM what the underlying system is capable of, the parameters the API requires to fulfill an action and the LLM can figure out the users intentions and ask follow up questions until it had enough info to call the API. You can specify the prompt in English and it works in all of the languages that the LLM has been trained on.
Yes I’ve done both approaches