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Comment by FireBeyond | Hacker News Reader

> And this is probably coming, a few years from now. Because remember, Apple doesn't usually invent new products. It takes proven ones and then makes its own much nicer version.

Except this doesn't stand up to scrutiny, when you look at Siri. FOURTEEN years and it is still spectacularly useless.

I have no idea what Siri is a "much nicer version" of.

> Apple can integrate it with hardware and software in a way no other company can.

And in the case of Apple products, oftentimes "because Apple won't let them".

Lest I be called an Apple hater, I have 3 Apple TVs in my home, my daily driver is a M2 Ultra Studio with a ProDisplay XDR, and an iPad Pro that shows my calendar and Slack during the day and comes off at night. iPhone, Apple Watch Ultra.

But this is way too worshipful of Apple.

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In that list of Apple products that you own, do none of them match the ops comment? You’re saying none of those products are or have been in their time in the market a perfected version of other things?

There are lots of failed products in nearly every company’s portfolio.

AirTags were mentioned elsewhere, but I can think of others too. Perfected might be too fuzzy & subjective a term though.

We're talking about Apple Intelligence here and its ... "precursor" ... Siri.

Both of which have been absolutely underwhelming if not outright laughable in certain ways.

Apple has done plenty right. These two, which are the closest to the article, are not it.

Remember the time when the former members of the Siri team demoed a prototype for a more capable version of Siri and Apple didn't even use it

Perhaps I’m misremembering, but I feel sure that Siri was much better a decade ago than it is today. Basic voice commands that used to work are no longer recognised, or required you to unlock the phone in situations where hands free operation is the whole point of using a voice command.

There were certain commands that worked just fine. But they, in Apple's way, required you to "discover" what worked and what didn't with no hints, and then there were illogical gaps like "this grouping should have three obvious options, but you can only do one via Siri".

And then some of its misinterpretations were hilariously bad.

Even now, I get at a technical level that CarPlay and Siri might be separate "apps" (although CarPlay really seems like it should be a service), and as such, might have separate permissions but then you have the comical scenario of:

Being in your car, CarPlay is running and actively navigating you somewhere, and you press your steering wheel voice control button. "Give me directions to the nearest Starbucks" and Siri dutifully replies, "Sorry, I don't know where you are."

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