• Apple’s progress with Siri and artificial intelligence has been slow, and features promised in June remain delayed.
  • At a Siri team meeting, senior director Robby Walker acknowledged the frustration within the team, describing the delays as “ugly.”
  • Features like Siri understanding personal context and taking action based on a user’s screen are still not ready and may not make it into iOS 19.
  • Challenges include quality issues that caused these features to malfunction up to a third of the time and conflicts with Apple’s marketing division over showcasing incomplete features.
  • Apple has withdrawn related advertisements and added disclaimers on its website, citing extended development times.
  • Senior executives, including Craig Federighi and John Giannandrea, are reportedly taking personal accountability for the delays.
  • Walker emphasized that the team’s work is impressive and that the delayed features will be released once they meet Apple’s standards.
  • JcbAzPx@lemmy.world
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    3 hours ago

    Marketing over promising and making it developments problem. A tale as old as time.

  • snooggums@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Features like Siri understanding personal context and taking action based on a user’s screen are still not ready and may not make it into iOS 19.

    Tech companies not understanding exponential complexity is one of the funnier things to come out of recent years.

    • Auli@lemmy.ca
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      6 hours ago

      There stock would fall. I don’t care but investors would fear Apple is missing out on the future.

  • midori matcha@lemmy.world
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    21 hours ago

    Apple Intelligence hasn’t been much better than old Siri on unsupported devices.

    For a third of the time, she has a hard time recognizing the trigger word the first time (usually “Siri” rather than “Hey Siri”), and not perform my commands when all I want her to do is act as a voice-activated light switch.

    What exactly is the trillion dollar company struggling with here?

    • WolfLink@sh.itjust.works
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      5 hours ago

      Honestly I don’t really want a smart context-aware Siri, I just want something I can give simple, straightforward voice commands to, and get predictable, reliable results.

    • AA5B@lemmy.world
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      9 hours ago

      Interesting timing, where I’m seeing the opposite. All my Amazon devices suddenly can’t turn on a simple light switch, and one appears to have somehow factory reset.

      However Siri works perfectly. I use a button rather than wake word, but then it dies actually turn on my light

      • fishy@lemmy.today
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        8 hours ago

        It’s been theorized that Amazon is progressively making all Alexa devices worse so they can sell you on a subscription based AI version.

        • AA5B@lemmy.world
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          6 hours ago

          Maybe, but they may lose more customers than they expect ….

          There are privacy based devices for “always listening” voice assistants coming on strong

          I already use Siri with a button for a lot. recently it seems able to recognize more of my smarthome devices and it will now prompt to forward more complex queries to ChatGPT

          I’m really down to the intercom feature being the only reason to keep Alexa - I can’t control the devices my kids use at their mom’s house

      • T156@lemmy.world
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        2 hours ago

        They’re likely also winding down development in favour of their new LLM, which certainly isn’t going to help matters.

  • scarabic@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    A while ago I set up a Siri shortcut that opens ChatGPT in voice mode. Now I can just say “hey siri, ask the demon” and in a moment start talking to ChatGPT with no further commands and zero buttons pressed throughout. It answers in voice mode.

    This is pretty useful for things like doing units conversions while my hands are sticky during cooking, or just doing simple information lookups while my hands are busy. I use ChatGPT responsibly, never trusting it for things that aren’t one-dimensional information retrievals and summarization. It works great for me for like 50-60% of the things I used to Google. Internet search is, once again, just for finding websites, like it should be.

    What’s my point? We don’t need Siri Apple Intelligence to ship. There’s already something better. And it runs on my iPhone 14, which isn’t even compatible with Apple Flatulence.

    • invertedspear@lemm.ee
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      1 day ago

      I’ve never used Apple intelligence and Siri alone has done a fine job for unit conversions, info lookups, and most any other things. No need to fire up chat GPT for those basic uses

  • terwn43lp@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    baffles me why anyone supports a company that’s a decade behind their competitors

  • GingaNinga@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    I don’t want that on my phone. I just want a dumb program that sets alerts and schedules, I don’t want it interpreting information and I doubt most people really need that function on a phone.

    • tauren@lemm.ee
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      1 day ago

      Yeah, but smartphones have stopped offering anything new. I recently upgraded my 8-year-old device, and I hardly notice any difference. I bet other customers see that too. They are desperately trying to find the next big thing. It’s astonishing, however, that all these companies completely ignore the fact that their customers don’t even want AI features.

      • Optional@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        But but but . … they’ve spent Hundreds of Billions of Dollars on this!!! You HAVE to buy it!!! Noooooooooo

  • PattyMcB@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    The whole industry is a shit show right now with the “AI race”

    I don’t want to be a software developer anymore because it’s become a permanent deathmarch toward the next buzzword.

    • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      9 hours ago

      An AI age in software development will yield massive returns to anybody who makes it to “senior designer-developer” by the end of this decade, IMHO, if only because the totally fucked up unmantainable code bases made by “automated junior developers” will much more quickly reach end of life (the point were it costs more to try and fix/upgrade them than to rewrite them) and need to replaced (and the way to do that is to reverse engineer the Software Requirements from the existing apps an then build from scratch something new that satisfies those requirements, something which LLMs are entirelly unable to do).

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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      9 hours ago

      We just had a town hall with our CEO and they came right out and said we need to simultaneously add AI and not add AI to our products, because customers are both excited and nervous about it. Our competitors are putting “AI” everywhere in their marketing, while we’re just trucking along making a quality product.

      Our software works in a very dangerous environment, where mistakes could cost millions in damage and potentially risk human lives. So the end user just sees “AI” as a liability. But the decision makers as to what product to use are removed from conditions on the ground and respond well to marketing BS.

      We actually do use AI with some parts of the product (e.g. curve fitting on past data for better predictions), but we need to be very careful about how we advertise that.

      It’s dumb. Just pick the product based on what fits your operations best, don’t pick based on buzzwords…

      • Ulrich@feddit.org
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        8 hours ago

        Our software works in a very dangerous environment, where mistakes could cost millions in damage and potentially risk human lives.

        I mean attorneys don’t seem to have a problem submitting case law that AI hallucinated.

    • Auli@lemmy.ca
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      6 hours ago

      You’ve had AI on your phone for ages. All your pictures are “AI” touched. And no you don’t want the raw output cameras in phones are not that good.

      • MattTheProgrammer@lemmy.world
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        5 hours ago

        I was just fine without voice assistants and such. I especially don’t want LLMs being shoved down my throat at every turn.

    • TheFriar@lemm.ee
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      23 hours ago

      Right? Hink of everything else I can do with that space and computing power. Not to mention the fuckin environmental devastation we’d curb.