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Comment by retskrad | Hacker News Reader

Somehow, some way, Apple is the real winner in the voice assistant battle. They realized years ago that the rise of devices like Amazon Echo and Google Home would not have an impact on the iPhone. As a result, they accepted Siri as a dumb but good enough assistant and saved saved billions and billions of dollars in R&D.

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This theory would make sense if Apple themselves didn't admit they are spending millions a day to catch up on AI: https://mashable.com/article/apple-spending-millions-of-doll...

They successfully kicked the can into the future. That is arguably the best approach to technical debt: wait until you can wait no longer but failure is not a result. And they have deep pockets where millions per day in spend is immaterial ($384B in annual revenue, $167B in profit).

It would be nice if Apple dove into the open source chat assistant ecosystem, sorta-kinda like they did with Apple Maps.

Being Apple, I'm sure they are trying to do everything from scratch "better," but I think they could have already improved on Siri with Whisper, an open source LLM and some TTS out of the box.

At most they admit to spending million dollars/day not that they are doing to catchup. If news say Apple spending multi million dollars / day on chip design which is not admitting they are doing to catchup.

If they figure out LLM running offline on your iPhone, it will be very funny how Siri will be the winner at the end.

> saved saved billions and billions of dollars in R&D

Did they though? Do we know how much Google and Amazon spend on these devices?

Apple may have won the first battle by "not fighting" but the next battle is a race to make these dumb assistants smart.

Amazon seems to be the possible long term winner, as they don't make phones and still got millions to buy their "dumb speaker" when they (consumers) already had one in their pocket!

Amazon has admitted they spent upwards of 10B a year on Alexa. Alexa is much more feature rich than Siri, so I sure hope Apple isn’t out spending them.

I don’t know if I agree that Amazon will be the long term winner either. I see your logic, but Apple also has a speaker and a phone. The HomePod doesn’t have the same market share, but it’s still a sizable market (>20%).

IMO Google should have been the clear winner, but they will probably be the loser. They had cheap and varied hardware, they had phones, they had APIs and features like Alexa. But Google can’t seem to stop being Google, and of course GAssistant leadership has absolutely no focus or consistency roadmap. Perhaps tellingly they’re giving up on cloud “skills” and focusing on android.

https://www.geekwire.com/2023/amazon-will-cut-several-hundre...

https://www.statista.com/chart/29167/smart-speaker-ownership...

Another potential winner may emerge soon:

"OpenAI and Jony Ive in talks to raise $1bn from SoftBank for AI device venture"

https://www.ft.com/content/4c64ffc1-f57b-4e22-a4a5-f9f90a741...

OpenAI needs to keep the hype train going, SoftBank still has too much money, and Jony Ive was probably offered more money than he's ever made with Apple, likely making him the real winner

Inverse SoftBank is normally the best position.

The apple homepod is a nice, wireless speaker that can (usually) play the music you ask it to by voice command. If that's what you expect of it, it's really quite good.

I think Cortona won. /s

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