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Comment by justapassenger | Hacker News Reader

TBH, I wouldn't call Siri a search company nor an AI company. They were (and still are, a decade later) mediocre at both.

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They were ahead of the pack when Apple bought them. Then Apple spent a year or so making them remove and reduce their functionality and then release a gimped version that was nonetheless integrated into the OS.

Then the siri founders started another company, which was then bought by samsung and eventually released as Bixby.

Oof, that's not a good look.

Ah yes, I also don't think of walmart as a retailer because I don't like it

It's not about liking it. It's about having abilities to support your value proposition.

In my experience, Siri has basically only provided my results from another search engine, WolframAlpha, or an API I'm not allowed to see/use. If that's artificial intelligence, then I'm Issac Asimov.

It's barely acceptable voice recognition product hooked into a shitty Ask Jeeves that has barely improved since it was introduced.

Amazon's Alex is way ahead of Siri and Cortana. It's as if Apple doesn't really care about Siri anymore. I don't know if they see the market for this as dead and they're purposely not putting more resources in it, or if they just can't compete here.

They hired Google’s head of Search and AI to run Siri and are investing a lot, so they care.

It seems to be taking time for the impact to show, but his fingerprints are all over iOS 15 with on-device Siri, contextual awareness, Google Lens features, etc.

It's also far more invasive in nearly every case. It's not that Apple doesn't care about Siri, it's just that Apple is working under the unbreakable rule that Siri can't send private info to Apple in order to function and so all processing needs to be done on the device. Amazon hasn't given itself this limitation so it sends data and recordings to itself every time Alexa is invoked.

Apple knows it's in a worse position now but they're betting that it's the better position to be in for the long term.

While your sentiment that Apple operates under far stricter privacy protections is totally correct (in my estimation) in fact until the latest version of iOS Siri absolutely did rely on sending audio data over the network for dictation and processing.

Case in point, it has always been possible to use Siri to turn on Airplane Mode, but until iOS 15 it was not possible to use it to turn it off (which they included in a demo at WWDC this year to somewhat humorous effect if you were paying attention)

That's not entirely accurate. You have the option of sending that audio data to Apple for processing (which is set during the setup for new iPhones and was a preference set when the update was released). It's completely optional and does affect what options are available through Siri and which ones aren't. Additionally, you have the option to change this setting after the fact and changing it deletes all the voice data stored on Apple's servers. You do have to trust that Apple is doing what they say when you choose to do that but it's not a requirement.

I just grabbed my partner's iPhone (ios 14), turned on airplane mode. Trigger Siri and it says not available without an internet connection. Try it for yourself, prior to iOS 15 Siri simply does not work without a network connection.

I think the option you're thinking of refers to whether or not to allow Apple access to your data for training purposes, not the normal use of the feature.

John Gruber discusses this with Apple execs here, they explicitly call it out: https://youtu.be/-SzbucgATjA?t=2174

This shouldn’t be downvoted. I loved Siri, but now even my 5 year olds know that Alexa is the only useful voice assistant. It’s painful in comparison…

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