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#apple#family#better#sometimes#market#seems#requires#siri#don#sharing
Discussion (14 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Siri: ... "Here's what I found on the web for "what is my ETA'"
From outside I don't know the cause but contrary to their normal reputation for better integration between parts of their products it seems like Siri is in some organizational way fundamentally broken.
But what’s really lacking is a model for multiple people sharing a single computing experience in real life. Companion mode in Google Meet or Spotify Jam are two attempts but both still force you through the one user, one device path.
Two adults sitting in a car shouldn’t have to constantly think “whose phone is this?” connected to CarPlay. Especially when they’re part of the same Apple “family” and on a Spotify family plan.
Two people seamlessly interacting with one “system” would break all sorts of auth and other assumptions, but it seems worth figuring out as computing becomes more and more prevalent in every facet of life.
Imagine harnessing the desktop devices within the home for a family-focused OpenClaw, Xgrid-style, rather than offloading to some server far away that is unaware of the general context of a household.
And also living without it doesn’t really affect Apple’s bottom line. But yeah I wish I had an AI assistant in my iPhone which would text back my parents with what I’m doing today and reply to their needless updates I get since buying them smartphones.
Siri in general seems to be, for me at least, superfluous. The answer to most questions I ask is “I don’t know” or “I didn’t catch that” or “I can’t”. AI in general is still causing me major question marks, especially where it comes to the valuations right now on the stock market. This morning I was watching Bloomberg at the European open and noticed one of my stocks wasn’t really moving as usual, and the presenter then announced that the Nordic markets were closed today because of the Ascension Day public holiday. So I googled “is the Danish stock market open today?” and naturally Google’s AI was the top link, proudly announcing “Yes! The Danish market is open today, here are the hours yadda yadda”. I scrolled down and found the actual link to the market and it showed that, of course, the market is closed, it’s ascension day. So I asked the Google AI - “are you sure about that?” and it thought again and found out that “no, the Danish stock market is closed today. I apologise for telling you it was open without checking”. Honest to god this is the tech that’s putting Nvidia at a $5.5Trilion valuation and keeping the market at all time highs right now? A technology that makes even Google worse?
Siri is occasionally useful in the car if I'm by myself but mostly in the better than nothing sense.
I think it's fair to say that a technology Amazon was, at one point, going to fill a building in downtown Boston to further develop has been extremely underwhelming.
It will get it right most of the times, but sometimes it puts her as wildly younger than she is, and once it even said she wasn't born yet so I should prepare for xyz.
I don't think it is these PR issues that cause Apple such consternation, partly as -- even as someone who lives a personal life filled with such corner cases -- I just don't think those are complex issues to solve, but mostly as Apple never seems to put much thought into corner cases like this anywhere else in their business, even when it doesn't butt up against the skewed demographics of software developers (such as how Cydia had much better handling of independent developers and joint projects than Apple's App Store still does 15 years later, and the what ifs were often fascinating to handle).
In reality, the "what ifs" that Apple gets stuck on are lower level, and can even sometimes be spun in a sympathetic light: "what if a domestic abuser manages to automate so much of your software that they essentially have persistent spyware on your device" or "what if a user scripts something to the point where their phone doesn't work quite right and constantly needs tech support" or "what if people share so much of their content with someone else that they share private information without realizing"...
...but -- as is the case with their App Store restrictions that sometimes are reasonable but almost always are not -- the truth is their implied concerns are selfish: "what if a family only buys one iPad for their two or even three kids and we lose 10% of our hardware revenue" or "what if some college roommates declare themselves a family and start sharing purchases of movies and books" or "what if kids in high school (aka, 13+) can still agree to screen time limits they can't change and then don't spend as much time engaged with their phone".
It isn't just that Apple has merely not implemented some of the stuff in this article or doesn't understand what people want: instead, as their business model (like almost all big tech business models) is inherently extractive and even a bit exploitative, their need to optimize for profit is a tradeoff against what people want, so they go out of their way (in ways that are sometimes ridiculous, such as how payments work for family sharing) to make some of these use cases so broken that it forces and/or misleads their customers into spending more (and sometimes a lot more) money to work around the otherwise-arbitrary limitations.
They should just provide the hardware.
I mean thats not actually true
It requires a shit tonne of context and also has a fucktonne of bad outcomes that people accept with chatGPT but not apple products.
> Know that my son has a test on Thursday and hasn’t opened the revision material since Monday. A gentle nudge, not a surveillance report.
That requires two bits of context that are hard to find:
1) that there is an exam. Ideally it'll be in the calendar, but who's exam is it actually? is it the creator, the invitee or owner of the calendar's exam
2) That certain actions on the web == revision. THat requires knowing what the exam is about, what the offical study material is, and more importantly cross account access to web history.
> Track our medication schedule and ping people (or me, if someone misses a window) without turning into a clinical monitoring tool.
How do you nonintrusive test that medication has been taken? How do you know its the right pills? How do you upload the prescription to do that? how do you handle power of attorney? How do you not get sued when people rely on it?
> Coordinate pickup times, grocery lists, meal plans–the sort of mundane family logistics that currently live in a group chat and three different apps.
Again sharing of rawe data to model to build a context. How do you screen for privacy? how do you make sure that talking about private stuff (like love interest etc) doesn't leak into other contexts?
> Better family e-mail, better event handling, better package tracking across household members.
Define better.
Look as someone who worked on AR/AI assistant glasses, its trivial to make something like that which works 80% of the time. You can't make it secure though, because it requires removing a bunch of privacy barriers that stop fraud and stuff leaking to third parties.
Its a really hard problem to crack to both be accurate, private and secure. You can pick one, at best.