> I think that’s why they haven’t jumped so far because they have hundreds of millions of users who have daily habits that they don’t want to lightly disturb.

I don't think that's part of their decision making, Liquid Glass moved most things around for seemingly not much else than novelty and that's not the first time.

Right now Alexa+ and Gemini are objectively better.

The best is ChatGPT voice mode. It understands non English words and accents amazingly well, and even though the LLM model isn’t the full fledged one, I can have deep conversations with it for an hour without it missing a beat.

On just the transcription side:

WhisprFlow produces much better speech-to-text for long text messaging-by-voice (dictation / transcription) than apple's speech-to-text does. Whisper models in general seem to do a lot better than most built-into-OS/app models. Which is interesting, because there's nothing stopping them from just using Whisper models.

I love MacWhisper personally. Also, Gumroad is a fantastic app distribution platform for my personal values.

https://goodsnooze.gumroad.com/l/macwhisper

As far the "decision tree" side ... there's not much that can be done about that now. Agentic agents still go too "off-the-rails" to be productionized out to the billions of smartphones of the world. I'm working on voice-controlled agentic-with-rails AI features for my HomeAssistant, because Alexa / Google Home suck. But that's a hobby project and rogue AI actions only affect me, not billions of customers.

Google user here. My experience with the new assistant is worse. The old one could pretty reliably set timers. The new one could not.

Claude.. I switched my phone assistent to claude and it does everything that google (used to) do like set alarms and timers, but also does everything claude can do.

My android phone was so much better for voice-to-everything. Whether it was transcribing my voice for text messages, or doing looks on the internet. Siri is just so bad.

Still love not having google's paws all over my data, though, so not going back.

Feeling #blessed that I apparently have the exact same upper midwest accent they must've trained Siri on, because I've literally never had an issue with dictation or being misheard. And I use it a lot!

(It misunderstands my wife from California all the time, though.)

As a Google user in a household of iPhones, my opinion is Gemini on android is radically better than Siri.

> Who’s doing it better?

Any of the Whisper-based apps on the App Store.

Grok integration in a Tesla is doing it muuuuuuuch better.

Plus, if someone else does it better (or different), I bet they've got a team and technology at a 90% done state waiting to jump on it, pick it apart and make it better. I don't think they're not doing anything.

Here have an anecdote: Gemini Assistant is pretty good.

It’s not “transformatively better” but it definitely involves fewer frustrations to interact with. That’s always been Apple’s main value proposition, you’re not getting the most cutting-edge stuff but you’re supposed to have something that “just works” not something that makes you go “GODDAMN IT!” when it inexplicably seems to fumble normal things.

So if you buy Apple products based on that value proposition it’s a big problem for Apple if they can’t seem to keep their brand-promise in this area.

Yesterday my google home mini gave me the current temperature in farenheit. I live in Canada and use a pixel. Dumbest fucking AI going. May as well give it to me in coulombs per hectare.