My personal favourite is Siri responding to a request to open the garage door, a request it had successfully fielded hundreds of times before, by placing a call to the Tanzanian embassy. (I've never been to Tanzania. If I have a connection to it, it's unknown to me. The best I can come up with is Zanzibar sort of sounds like garage door.)

A feature I would love is to toggle "answer calls on speakerphone" based on location, so that I can answer a call with my phone on the desk while I'm at home and not have my ear blasted off taking a call when I'm walking down the street.

It’s such trash. Constant conditioning for garbage.

Timers and alarm clocks it is.

I've found I appreciate having Siri for a few things, but it's not good enough to make it something I reach for frequently. Once burned, twice shy.

I’m looking at you, Photos sync.

EDIT: just noticed this exact problem is on the front page in its own right (https://eclecticlight.co/2025/11/30/last-week-on-my-mac-losi...)

This is why LLMs are the first conversational interface to actually have a chance of working, once you give them enough tools.

All chat bots suffer this flaw.

GUIs solve it.

CLIs could be said to have it, but there is no invitation to guess, and no one pretends you don’t need the manual.

Interesting that you've also had that problem.

I think this also interacts with countries and states that have (possibly misguided) strict laws forbidding the "touching" of phones "while driving". My experiences suggest that using Siri when driving and the device is locked, it just gives up - I sort of see the start of it working then, bam, it stops. If I retry, I suspect that I've somehow "looked" at the phone in frustration, it saw my attention and unlocked. I now wonder if where I have placed the device is making a difference.

It does seem to work much better (when driving) if the device is already unlocked.

I also see odd things when using Shortcuts for navigation. If I've previously asked for walking directions and then speak the shortcut while driving it won't give directions until I switch to the "car" icon in maps. I think it might be trying to calculate the 15Km walking directions, but it doesn't complete before I tell it, frustrated, to stop.

When Siri doesn't work it is usually the times when I need it to. This is definitely a multiplier in disastisfaction.

When they introduced "machine learning" it started working much worse - things that used to work 99% of the time (if you knew the incantation) now randomly fail in inexplicable ways.

And now it never gets my kids' names right. If I'm doing voice-to-text I will actually see it flash the correct spelling, and then replace it with some random phrase.

It is ridiculously useless for most things though. Like I’ll ask it a question on my Apple Watch and it will do a web search and give me a bunch of useless links.

for example I say: "play comically long album title by artist on Spotify", it thinks about that for five seconds, does the bing noise, then says "playing comically long album title [special remastered edition] by artist on Spotify", and then a few seconds later starts playing the album, and if you don't wait through that whole thing it will just decide that actually you didn't want to hear the album

Tell me my next event when I’m driving.

You know I have talked to chatGPT for maybe a 100 hours over the past 6 months. It gets my accent, it switches languages, it humors. It understands what I am saying even if it hallucinates once in a while.

If you can have chatGPT level of comprehension, you can do a lot with computers. Maybe not vim level of editing, but every single function in a driving car should be controllable by voice, and so could a lot of phone and computer functions.

Just that... nobody is willing to pay much for a thing that will do some basic search, dictate a recipe, or do unit conversion, or add a thing to a list.

> Alexa, turn on the bedroom lights.

> OK lights turn on

In the evening:

> Alexa, turn on the bedroom lights.

> I'm sorry, I don't know a device called "bedroom lights".

How is it even possible to build a computer system that behaves like this?

What is it about Siri’s architecture that causes “Set bedroom light to 30%”, a command that worked for years, to randomly stops working on a random Tuesday with no OS update or home change?

I mean, what on earth are they doing on the back end…?

But Android has been 100% accurate for simple commands for over a decade for me. Things like:

- "weather." tells me forecast of where I am.

- "alarm at 8am" and "alarm in 30 minutes" works as expected.

- calendar commands also work

My favourite is "go home" which opens Google map with a route to home.

These things just work. I don't recall last time I had to repeat myself.

Failing to find any way to get the alarm thing back, I turned off the entire assistant thing.

"Here is what I found about "The Dragonborn comes at 25" on the Internet" opens Safari

Not true for me at all, it fails at the most basic tasks, sometimes even at tasks it has done before. Three examples:

- "Timer 5 minutes" -> Loading spinner is shown. Siri disappears after a few seconds. No error, no confirmation. I then have to manually check if the timer was set or not (it was not).

- "Turn on the lights in the living room" to which it responds "Sorry, I cannot do that". I have Phillips Hue lights that are connected to Apple Home, of course Siri can do that. It did that before.

- "Add tooth paste to my shopping list". The shopping list is a list I have in reminders. It then tries to search for the query on Google. I then tried "Add tooth paste to the list shopping list in reminders" which worked, but if I have to be this wordy, it is no longer any convenient.

There are many more simple cases in which Siri always / sometimes fails. I also have the feeling that it performs far worse if asked in my native language (German) than in English.

They already lost this superpower in the EU and I think Japan, India, Brazil too. Early next year they've got their US antitrust trial, and later in the year are some class actions challenging their control over app distribution, and at least two pieces of draft legislation are circulating that would require allowing competing apps to be defaults.

If they need another two years they might face an entrenched and perhaps even better competitor, while their own app needs to be downloaded from the App Store.

For one thing, the iPad (market-leading tablet) and the iPhone (market-leading pocket touchscreen device) were not their first attempt at doing that. That would be the Newton, which was an actual launched product and a commercial failure.

For another thing, even Apple can't just become the market leader by doing nothing. They need to enter late with a good product, and having a good product takes R&D, which takes time. With MP3 players, smartphones, and tablets, they didn't exactly wait until the industry was burnt through before they came in with their offering; they were just later (with the successful product) than some other people who did it worse. They were still doing R&D during those years when they were "waiting."

Apple could still "show up late" to AI in a few more years or a decade, using their current toe-dipping to inform something better, and it would still fit into the picture you have of how they "should've done it." Not to mention, Apple's also lost its way before with things like convoluted product lines (a dozen models of everything) and experimental products (the Newton then, Apple Vision now); messing up for a while also isn't exactly bucking history.

Anything you ask an Android device to do, or an Alexa device goes to their clouds to be 100% processed there.

Apple tried to make a small and focused interface that could do a limited set of things on device without going to the cloud to do it.

This was built around the idea of "Intents" and it only did the standard intents... and app developers were supposed to register and link into them.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/intents

Some of the things didn't really get fleshed out, some are "oh, that's something in there?" (Restaurant reservations? Ride Booking?) and feels more like the half baked mysql interfaces in php.

However, as part of privacy - you can create a note (and dictate it) without a data connection with Siri. Your "start workout" command doesn't leave your device.

Part of that is privacy. Part of that is that Apple was trying to minimize its cloud spend (on GCP or AWS) by keeping as much of that activity on device. It wasn't entirely on device, but a lot more of it is than what Android is... and Alexa is a speaker and microphone hooked up to AWS.

This was ok, kind of meh, but ok pre-ChatGPT. With ChatGPT the expectations changed and the architecture that Apple had was not something that could pivot to meeting those expectations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Intelligence

> Apple first implemented artificial intelligence features in its products with the release of Siri in the iPhone 4S in 2011.

> ...

> The rapid development of generative artificial intelligence and the release of ChatGPT in late 2022 reportedly blindsided Apple executives and forced the company to refocus its efforts on AI.

ChatGPT was as much a blindside to Apple as the iPhone was to Blackberry.

They should actually make something useful first, and then work backwards to making it private before releasing it.

If you've never been to China, you need to look no further than the streets to understand this (cameras everywhere, social credit system, etc.)

big company bad, or do you have examples?

Just checked I’m on iOS 18.2.

Been like this many versions, but dunno if it does it with the latest.

It could potentially help tremendously but for that they would need to understand the usefulness of LLMs and tool usage.

But mainly I wanted to share that video because Craig Federighi calling the AI/ML team "AI/MLess" is one heck of a burn

Perhaps you are not getting it rammed down your throat because you’re not a business user? On personal editions one area where AI has been a failure is taking over the search bar, but you’re right, you can disable it.

And for audio production - I'm just a dabbler, really, but I've been able to do some really impressive things with just GarageBand and a Fender Mustang Micro amp-plug over USB-C. It "just works" unlike my experience on Linux recently, where there are lots of little bits that are genius, but I couldn't manage to figure out how to get a basic midi synth working with a DAW that had a UI that was designed for humans. (Jack is amazing, though - being able to do arbitrary audio filter chains with random pieces of software is seriously cool.)

Nah, IS&T has always been under the CFO, and apparently some fraction of AIML is headed under them.

I'm not saying that way to solve a problem, but I refuse to believe that it has to be as bad as it is. The worst part is that it's still better than the alternative of leaving the iOS ecosystem.

Apple is just so bizarre in general. I would say "nowadays" but I think they have always been like this. It took them how many decades to add a unit converter to the iPhone? And after all that time, they buried it in a menu in the Calculator app?

I suspect they had a very carefully hand-crafted model before, and replaced it with an ML model "that will fix itself over time" - and it never did.