I really don’t understand the absolute fixation on Siri here.
Occasionally I ask it to call someone or set a timer. What other things do I need an “assistant” for in my daily life?
For those who compare it to things like chatGPT, are you looking for Siri to write essays for you or something?
Downvotes are easy, maybe explain what you actually want out of a “new” Siri? If I could go back to the Voice Commands prior to Siri I would 🤷♂️
I hope I can help you understand. All of these people, tech journalists, tech engineers, and nearly universal consumers (including me) have all said for years that Siri doesn't work right or well at the limited things it is supposed to be able to do. 10 years ago, I should have been able to tell Siri, "Hey Siri, text message to mom" and have it reliably respond, "what would you like to say to mom?" It sometimes does, but still does not reliably do this, in the car, on my watch, on the couch, or one of my home pods from another room will answer my query, and be ignored by my phone. Ugh!!! This is absolutely inexcusable. It is embarrassing, and some day will make me switch to Google's platform, which works at these things much, much better. Apple touts itself as being the leader in user experience, in user interface development, in "it just works." Siri is a user interface. It does not work.
As to asking "what other things do I need an "assistant" to do in my life?" it is not our job to figure this out. It is Apple's job. Steve Jobs was notoriously antagonistic to even the idea of using focus groups. His point was that Apple should be figuring out what people want, rather than people telling Apple what they want. This is called innovation. Apple has been so great at figuring out how to make things easier and better to use in so many ways. With Siri, it has done worse than fail at this. it has created a technology that is so bad you want to completely turn it off, even though you should be able to use it, and using it could make all of their products so much better. What a shame. I truly believe, if Apple doesn't dump the Siri it uses now, and start with something completely new, whatever its name might be, it could kill Apple as Apple's competition continues to leave Apple in the dust with AI. I really hope they aren't forcing all these new engineers and AI experts to shoehorn workable AI advances into the broken framework that is Siri. This might end up being the largest historical example of a company killing itself due to the sunk costs of time, money, energy and marketing into a strategy that has been a pitiful, laughable failure for 10 years. I still scratch my head and ask, how could Apple let this continue to happen? My answer, for now, is that they are doing enough other things correctly that Siri hasn't yet killed them.
