does anyone buy a product for AI or Assistant features?
this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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Some people bought scam pins/portable assistant that is actually a butchered phone thing, so, yeah.
Tech bros and "influencers" don't count. We're talking about real people. All of those devices failed because no one other than those seeking to ride the bleeding edge of technology actually are interested. The most anyone want Siri or Google Assistant to do is set alarms, set appointments, and pick-up/hang-up the phone when you're on speaker. Sometimes it's nice to ask it to do a search but the original versions of these did that fine until they started "improving" them with "AI".
A) No executives anywhere are taking personal accountability for anything
B) I upgraded from the 12 to the 16 for Apple Intelligence and I have yet to see it offer value. A substantial portion of hey Siri voice requests return with “I’m sorry I didn’t get that” even when using the voice transcription feature gets the words right
Marketing over promising and making it developments problem. A tale as old as time.
Terrible voice assistant. I preferred Google assistant, but even that is becoming slow.
They neutered Google Assistant because it was costing too much money. Now it's ass.
They're likely also winding down development in favour of their new LLM, which certainly isn't going to help matters.
Siri is so useless. All these years and I use her to basically set timers and reminders.
I’ve added limes to the grocery list
Sure, here's a station just for you.
SIRI CANCEL
‘It’s still in development’ doesn’t strike me as “dire.”
Dire as in, it was supposed to ship 6 months ago as the highlight of the iPhone 16 series.
Dear god!! The end is nigh!!
When it falls into false advertising in every market that the iPhone is sold, it is.
- Take screenshot of screen
- Send screenshot to Claude 3.7 or any other decent chatbot. Even GPT-3 is light years smarter than current Siri, but I don’t know it if can analyze images
- Run Claude’s response through a text-to-Siri-speech layer
There, now Siri can see your screen. Why can’t Apple accomplish this? Why are megacorps so inept?
This is the most defensible point. Designing APIs to determine what content on your screen is ok to send to a third party (Apple offers ChatGPT integration) is a decent amount of work.
Spend 5 minutes creating a bash script
Spend 5 billion dollars on an overly complicated summarizer
Why the fuck would I wanna write bash
Yeah let's keep it POSIX
This whole thing is a textbook example of how bad shady marketing today and can really cause you a lot of pain tomorrow. If Apple had not been so quick to let PR write checks their ass was not ready to cash the conversation around Siri would still just be the casual jokes about it sucking, and not more serious public blackeyes.
"Taking personal accountablility", but not a paycheck.
Ok… this is what it is I suppose, every business wants to be on the AI train, but, this seems like an opportunity to make the next iPhone, or at least a version of it, without AI as a selling point.
I’d be very happy indeed to have an option that was entirely devoid of, and incompatible with, any form of AI and I know I’m not alone in that. Sell it as prioritizing privacy or respecting consumers desire to opt out, whatever the marketing folks come up with. But that would be my next phone in a heartbeat.
I can run an LLM on a phone from before the AI craze, it would be slow but it would still run. You can't really make a phone that isn't compatible with AI.
No, I suppose not, but just like home brew software apple can put up walls.
I guess I just mean it would be nice to be able to opt out. If I want to run an AI app, I can always set up a docker or something and run it for myself. I think at this point, I’ve just got AI fatigue ¯_(ツ)_/¯
That is not going to happen.
Def not, but I’ll keep day dreaming :)
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