Right! Also I don’t think Siri is that important to the overall user experience on the ecosystem. Sure it’s one of the most visible use cases but how many people really care about that? I don’t want to talk out loud to do tasks usually, it’s helpful in some specific scenarios but not the primary use case. The text counterpart of understanding user context on the phone is more important even in the context of llms, and that what plays into the success of their stack going forward

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lurking_swe 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

are you really asking why someone would like a much better siri?

- truck drivers that are driving for hours.

- commuters driving to work

- ANYONE with a homepod at home that likes to do things hands free (cooking, dishes, etc).

- ANYONE with airpods in their ears that is not in an awkward social setting (bicycle, walking alone on the sidewalk, on a trail, etc)

every one of these interaction modes benefits from a smart siri.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Why can’t I have a siri that can intelligently do multi step actions for me? “siri please add milk and eggs to my Target order. Also let my wife know that i’ll pick up the order on my way home from work. Lastly, we’re hosting some friends for dinner this weekend. I’m thinking Italian. Can you suggest 5 recipes i might like? [siri sends me the recipes ASYNC after a web search]”

All of this is TECHNICALLY possible. There’s no reason apple couldn’t build out, or work with, various retailers to create useful MCP-like integrations into siri. Just omit dangerous or destructive actions and require the user to manually confirm or perform those actions. Having an LLM add/remove items in my cart is not dangerous. Importantly, siri should be able to do some tasks for me in the background. Like on my mac…i’m able to launch Cursor and have it work in agent mode to implement some small feature in my project, while i do something else on my computer. Why must i stare at my phone while siri “thinks” and replies with something stupid lol. Similarly, why can’t my phone draft a reply to an email ASYNC and let me review it later at my leisure? Everything about siri is so synchronous. It sucks.

It’s just soooo sooo bad when you consider how good it could be. I think we’re just conditioned to expect it to suck. It doesn’t need to.

	▲	FridgeSeal a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> siri please add milk and eggs to my Target order. Woah woah woah, surely you’re not suggesting that you, a user, should have some agency over how you interact with a store? No, no, you’re not getting off that easy. They’ll want you to use Terry, the Target-AI, through the target app.
	▲	nerdjon 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I doubt that anyone is actually suggesting that Siri should not be better, but to me I think the issues with it are very much overblown when it does what I actually ask it to do the vast majority of the time since the reality is most of the time what I actually want to ask it to do are basic things. I have a several homepods, and it does what I ask it to do. This includes being the hub of all of my home automation. Yes there are areas it can improve but I think the important question is how much use would those things actually get vs making a cool announcement, a fun party trick, and then never used again. We have also seen the failures that have been done by trying to treat LLM as a magic box that can just do things for you so while these things are "Technically" possible they are far from being reliable.

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SoftTalker a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I've never used Siri. Never even tried it. It's disabled on my phone as much as I've been able to work out how to do.

	▲	jay_kyburz a day ago \| parent [-]
		We have a home pod, we use it a lot for simple things like timers when cooking or playing a particular kind of music. They are simple and dumb, but they have become part of our lives. It's just a hands free way to doing simple things we might do on the phone. We are looking forward to being able to ask Siri to pipe some speech through to an AI