Siri was also completely miscommunicated from the beginning. I could never get Siri to do what I wanted, because I didn't realize that it had a very strict and narrow menu, but it never communicated what that menu was, and had no way of saying "here are the 5 things you can tell me about." And then there were the network communication issues where you don't know why you're not getting a response, or if Siri is going to work at all.

Every few years I would try to use it for a few days, then quit in frustration at how useless it was. Accidentally activating Siri is a major frustration point of using Apple products for me.

Siri is really a pretty useless product. Its annoying that sometimes I can say “siri is x y” and it will answer me but other times it will respond “sorry I cant google this while youre driving” or whatever response. I see no reason I cant say “siri read me the wikipedia page on the thirty years war”. Why cant I query with siri? “Siri where is the closest gas station coming up?” I basically only want siri whilst driving and half the features are turned off then.

Alexa is in the same boat. Compared to old-fashioned finger-and-screen interfaces, maybe voice simply isn't a great way to interact with computers in the general case. It's inconvenient, unreliable, and even if it works quite slow. Yet you see companies continue to chase the dream in the current generative AI craze.

I get the sci-fi "wow" appeal, but even the folks who tried to build Minority Report-style 3D interfaces gave up after realizing tired arms make for annoyed users.

I know, it's lame. Over that amount of time Apple with the help of third party developers could have walked much of useful distance we now are trying to run to with LLMs for controlling devices. Unfortunately Apple neither wanted to give up the interaction point to developers nor develop it themselves, and only gave users some control super late with Shortcuts.

I'd throw in the failure to do anything meaningful with home automation, which I guess could fall under the Siri umbrella of failure. Maybe I'm still peeved big tech bought up the industry just to kill any innovation.

Uses for Siri:

1. Checking the current temp or weather

2. Setting an alarm, timer, or reminder

3. Skipping a music track or stopping the music altogether roughly 3 seconds after hearing the command, or 1 second after you assume it didn't work

<end of list>

Yep. It was theirs to lose… and they lost it.

It's actually crazy how they've seemingly managed to do absolutely nothing with Siri in a decade and a half. I legitimately have no idea what features it has had added, but I still try basic things and am shocked at how useless it is.

I was excited when I recently got an iPhone 16 Pro - it comes with Apple Intelligence! Surely this is how Siri leaps into the future and starts doing things like translating for me, or responding with a photo and some basic facts when I ask who Ariana Greenblatt is, or letting me convert from Krore to USD (it gives results for rupees every time it seems?) or...

Anyways, I asked it something basic, and Siri said it would have to use Apple Intelligence. Not like, prompting me if I want to use it, just saying it's needed, then turning off. I'm pretty confused as to what Apple Intelligence is at this point, since I assumed it would be Siri. "Hey Apple Intelligence" doesn't do anything, so I ask ChatGPT. It informs me that AI is, in fact, part of Siri. I... do not know why it gave me that response.

Back to timers and alarms.

Edit - this is your daily reminder that you can NO LONGER SHUT OFF IPHONES BY HOLDING DOWN THE POWER BUTTON.

Honestly, my experience with Siri is that it works worse than it did 10 years ago. It's not clear to me if that's with Siri itself or just the general decrease in quality of Apple software over the past N years, but zero changes would have been an improvement.

Things that seemed to work reliably for me 10 years ago but now do not:

1. "Call mom". Siri has apparently forgotten who my mother is. I tried "Hey Siri <name> is my mother" and I got an error. I'm sure it's resolvable but come on.

2. "Directions to <destination>" This always used to fail when it couldn't find places, but lately, when I'm driving, Siri will respond "Getting directions to <destination>" and then... nothing. No directions come up. I have to do it 2-3 times to have the directions actually start.

I'm amazed 'set a reminder for x when I leave this location' still doesn't get the 'when I leave this location'. It's clear user expectation created internally (by siri marketing) and externally (by ai tools) has far outpaced capability.

> A decade and a half is insane timeline in tech industry, and huge majority of users use Siri the same way today as 15 years ago, setting a timer or an alarm clock.

When it works!

I’ve spend days where it goes wonky and says something went wrong for anything I ask. How is it that with modern phones the voice recognition and whatnot isn’t running locally?

The one God-damn thing I really liked using it for, "skip to next chapter" in CarPlay podcasts, they REMOVED.

Google Now. It's even completely gone and forgotten.

hey, the most reliable way to send something to yourself is still via email. if it works it works.

Was the failure really driven by privacy policy? Long term a privacy play is the right move. But right now, Siri's capabilities even underwhelm vis-a-vis a model with no understanding of user context that is just interpreting commands.

> Apple focused so much on privacy

Apple also doesn't have actual privacy since their focus was using the word strategically against their competitors, not actually protecting user data.

> Subramanya, who Apple describes as a "renowned AI researcher," spent 16 years at Google, where he was head of engineering for Gemini. He left Google earlier this year for Microsoft. In a press release, Apple said that Subramanya will report to Craig Federighi and will "be leading critical areas, including Apple Foundation Models, ML research, and AI Safety and Evaluation."

I don't see how Google + Copilot mindset even touches on privacy. I wouldn't be surprised if we users will be forced to pay even more personal data in the near future.

If total invasion of privacy is the only way to make AI useful, then maybe it isn't useful?

> From the outside looking in it really feels like Apple focused so much on privacy and now has no strategy of how to make that work with AI right now.

Are you referring to https://security.apple.com/com/blog/private-cloud-compute/?

The only way that AI will ever be able to replace each of us, is if it gathers our entire audio, text, etc history. PCC seemed like the only viable option for a pro-AI, yet pro-privacy person such as myself. I thought PCC was one of the most thoughtful things I had every seen a FAANG do.

Are you saying that there is no technical solution for privacy and AI to coexist? Not only that, but that was the blocker?

I am genuinely interested if anyone can provide a technical answer.

I find it hard to believe privacy is the issue. Chinese companies have no issue releasing great self hostable models (and some admittedly nearly impossible to self host due to the sheer size)

People only want privacy if it doesn’t come at the cost of a good product. It’s not enough on its own.

Yes, I think the question here is not so much why the old is leaving, but if anyone seriously expects the new guy to succeed any more? ex-Microsoft too, not exactly a great start.

What does seem slightly odd is Apple have probably saved billions by failing to be dragged into the current model war.

If there's a company who could ever afford to be late to the party is apple though.

Not the first to bring mp3 players to the market, nor phones, nor tablets. Market leader every time.

They could have just stayed in a corner talking about privacy, offer a solid experience while everything else drowns in slop, researched UX for llms and come 5 years later with a killer product.

I don't get why they went for the rush. It's not like AI is killing their hardware sales either.

I think the only department involved in privacy at apple is the marketing department. Nobody else has worked in anything related.

> it really feels like Apple focused so much on privacy and now has no strategy of how to make that work with AI right now

I see Apple dusting off its OG playbook.

We're in the minicomputing era of AI. If scaling continues to bear fruit, we'll stay there for some time. Potentially indefinitely. If, however, scaling plateaus, miniaturisation retakes precedence. At that point, Apple's hardware (and Google's mindshare) incumbency gains precedence.

In the meantime, Apple builds devices and writes the OS that commands how the richest consumers on Earth store and transmit their data. That gives them a default seat at every AI table, whether they bother to show up or not.

It could benefit them if they remained an AI free or a NOT AI first alternative once enshitification has really taken hold with AI.

I personally hope Apple doesn’t get too involved in the madness. If the sentiment changes they’ll be in a great position messaging wise. Microsoft and Google have thrown their reputations away.

I remember Tellme. They had an 800 number for free information via speech query but, of course, it was also for training ala 411GOOG. Fun times.

This is quite a spectacular CV.

Now I'm weighing more on the Apple side for not making it better.

This might be my new favourite definition of "failing upwards".

Everyone is struggling to create AI tools. And just because you don't approve of how they spend time to make their UI look "fancy", doesn't really mean much. You are not a normal user/customer.

Its gemini so at least its smartish and has some integration with the rest of the ecosystem so it can do some assistant work as long as its read mostly, but integration with the rest of the phone is almost non existent. It also struggle in noisy environments and in mixed language situations

If they didn’t have so many limitations imposed for safety or by permissioning. Hey Google call my wife. 30 seconds later “something has gone wrong”. Or hey Google play _______ on YouTube music. “Playing something else on you tube music”. Its stupid.

It works okay. I like that it's universal (the same assistant on my phone, on my home devices, in my car, in my earbuds). I like that it does tasks right, but you have to know how to phrase them (my most common is probably "remind me to X tomorrow at X time"). Setting alarms and timers, creating calendar events, asking about the weather on a specific day or in a specific place, asking how long it'll take to walk/drive somewhere -- all good. But anything more complicated than that and you get erratic behaviour. From what I've seen with my friends interacting with Siri, I'd say they're about equal in capability.

No. actually no company on earth has solved the voice assistant thing yet

I use it almost daily, to set timers and alarms

Could you share a bit about your use case/experience? Siri does what I need it to do— send messages, create reminders and calendar entries, look up basic facts and cites the source, play music, add things to lists, etc. I’m curious if you’re trying to do things that I haven’t, or if you’re just having a very different experience with those same things? Or maybe just have higher expectations for it?

Edit: why in gods name are people downvoting me for politely asking about someone’s differing experience?

It works pretty well for me, but doesn't do nearly what I'd expect.

EG I can talk to it like I would chatgpt and it works well. But I can't be like "hey I want to get dinner with my wife on our anniversary, please book the best available option in my city for fine dining"

It's still way better than Siri, which feels like a voice CLI to me (same as Alexa, which is very low quality IME)

If that’s true it would be quite interesting, as the AI folks are winning almost everywhere else in the software industry, notably at Google.

He was at Microsoft for a few months, and Google for 16 years before that.

I worked pretty closely with him and his team for a bit at Google, and he seemed like a great human being, in addition to being a great engineer. I wouldn't read too much into a few-month stint at Microsoft.

He is a researcher, so I would keep a bit of hope he is not the same as the regular business side of msft.

I use Windows every day and see no AI anywhere. It's trivial to turn off (thankfully) and we wouldn't even hear about it if there wasn't an outrage industry around Microsoft.

They changed it from responding to "Hey Siri" to just "Siri".

'Hot spot' as in Settings->Personal Hotspot? I've had that enabled for more than 10 years, and could count the number of times I've found it off and had to turn it on again using one hand. Sounds like a regional/carrier-specific thing. I recall that in the early days, carriers could disable hotspot functionality on their network. I hear hotspot functionality is pretty broken on iOS 26 though.

Even with ChatGPT in play it’s not very good.

Ten years ago, if it didn't understand what I meant, it told me so after 1-2 seconds.

Now, it'll show a loading indicator for 5-6 seconds and then do nothing at all... or do something entirely unrelated to my request (eg responding to "hey siri, how much is fourteen kilograms in pounds" by playing a song from my music library).

Supposedly the main blocker for launching is because Apple would consider it reputational damage if the AI hallucinates. They have a very conservative approach when it comes to LLMs (on the other hand they are happy to scan all your photos and messages in the guise of child safety and send the data to the government and ChatControl).

Problem is, Siri is already damaging Apple's reputation with how useless it is..

Apple have said 2026 they'll be focusing only on quality improvements for software, I believe.

Where is this "real AI" you speak of?

But those stock options and benefits were excellent… /s

Honestly he’s had one hell of a career. Even if Siri sucked.

We'd have working voice assistants if it wasn't for Apple Monopoly banning all apps that are "competition to Siri" and "asking for too many permissions" because sandbox is not compatible with system integration.