The new Siri makes one of Apple's most convenient OS features a cumbersome mess HANDS ON That new AI-juiced Siri that Apple rolled out last week at WWDC was supposed to set a new paradigm for on-device AI. But don't believe the hype coming out of Tim Cook's final big event. After a week-long test drive, it seems like Apple just crammed Google AI Overviews on top of the most useful parts of its various …
Though I didn't know it was called that.
There are (at on 26.x) settings that control what shows up there, maybe it is possible to restore the old behavior - or will be once iOS 27 moves out of beta. The author should report it as a bug, and see what Apple says.
Just make Siri
- less dumb
- less deaf
- better at remembering stuff you already know about (like stuff already asked for, searched for or ALREADY EXISTS in my music library) so you stop saying you don’t know about that
- be able to help me WHEN I AM DRIVING, not say you can’t because I am.
… and everyone will be in awe.
I have a smartphone because I have a continuous glucose monitor. My wife has a Doro = it makes/receives phone calls which is pretty much what she wants a phone to do.
Neither of us really want to carry a computer everywhere with us.
On the rare occasions I use MacOS I've gotten happily into the habit of just hitting Cmd-Space and typing what I want to run, as if it's a command line.
Always found it far more user friendly than the hapless, inaccurate mess that is Windows search (gotta love the irritating way it jumps between local and web searches seemingly with no rhyme or reason)
It sounds like Apple have taken a look at that and Google's excuse for a search engine and have gone "Hold my beer." Hopefully a lot of it can still be toggled off.
Thankfully my intel Macbook Pro is stuck on MacOS v15 (dual booted with Fedora for future proofing).
I have to ask the question - do Tech Bros, and Tech company CEO's (and other Execs) have a different version of the Internet to the rest of us? Or maybe some sort of Filter that blocks any negative information from getting to them?
If you do even the smallest search of a competitors AI implementation and see the hundreds of complaints about this and that, why on Earth would you think, "You know what? We need a bit of that too!".
I think the Cupertino Reality Distortion Field seems to have expanded to cover the whole of Silicon Valley, and every Tech Bros brain seems to be affected as well.
iglegal,
To quote Upton Sinclair, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Also, the senior execs have a PA (or several) to search the web for them. And present only the results they want.
But mostly it goes back to Sinclair's quote. They've all invested so much in AI that we have to want it. And seeing as MS, Apple and Google control the operating systems and software we use to interact with almost everything else - it doesn't matter what we want - we're going to get it anyway.
They have a similar situation to what you seem to have. You've mostly seen negative comments about AI, so you assume that's what's out there for them to see. There is plenty of that, but another thing there is plenty of is people complaining that Apple missed the boat on AI, promised a development they didn't deliver, and really need to fix that in order to catch up. Those people aren't negative on AI, they want more and they specifically want it from Apple and will criticize Apple for not making it. Many of those people are the types who work in tech media for non-tech people. Perhaps, like me, you find that kind of thing annoying because they often swallow any marketing promise from a tech firm without understanding it so avoid it, but it doesn't change that some of them have much more readership than El Reg does. If Apple sees that a few million people hear that Apple must leap forward on AI or be left behind and a few tens of thousands see complaints about all AI, they have two reasons to follow the former. The quantity one is obvious, but the other one is that, if someone hates all AI, and everything has AI, then expect no change in how many of them still choose an Apple product before turning the AI off.
The dedicated Siri app is also nice in its own way, as it shows a record of every conversation I’ve had with the new Apple Intelligence front end for later review
I think you mean "stores a record of every conversation everyone has had with the new Apple Intelligence, for Apple marketing".
Even the most brief questions [...] is now stored in perpetuity, cluttering up the list of chats we’ve had until I manually delete it
Why not ask Siri to clean those up for you? Can it not do that or did you not think of it?
"Siri, delete from our conversation history all my queries for weather forecasts." or "Siri, delete all of my conversations with you older than 48 hours." Etc...
But that's fucking Apple for you - I'm still pissed that their fucking *timer app* has a fucking history; like I need to see the 2min 30second timer I set a week ago for some stupid shit or the 15minutes timer from my morning "but I don'twant to go to work today" post-alarm snooze. Who wants this?
me. when I swapped from android pre timer history, I was so grumpy. I have a handful of timers I regularly set. Why make me enter them every single time? Maddening.
But I will say that the timer history is an absolute bag of shit - just keep the last X, ordered by length FFS. Or let me choose which ones to save.
