Absolutely agreed. It feels like tech companies forgot that they are supposed to add value to users. Theyve been shoving random AI usecases down their users throats with no regard for whether it works for the users flow or not. When theres so much value to be had from AI in normal products. Claude code is the best in this right now, probably because the engineers themselves are users.

This isnt unprecedented, its what happened in the dotcom bubble as well. But then that tech started getting used properly as well. So i think its a matter of time before claude code levels of value is avialable to normal users

> This isn’t necessary fancy, just let me set some calendar events without knowing the magic words or tell it to open Overcast and play the new Gastropod episode. Better yet, for power users, let me set up reusable shortcuts using natural language.

Isn’t this the proverbial ”faster horse”? Ie let me do exactly what I can do now, in a very slightly different, possibly very slightly more convenient way?

>The ideal implementation of AI for Apple is probably to finally make Siri work.

Upon learning about LLM's however many years ago (3? 4?), literally my first thought was:

"Oh, how Siri is supposed to work."

It's the single most obvious application.

People keep on saying Apple is far behind its competitors on AI. If Apple just waited on their Apple Intelligence announcements about Siri or other features that would have been best. Right now Apple makes money off of any subscriptions through the App Store which is actually profitable compared to the foundational AI companies which are spending trillions to make a technology which everyone will have but no one will expect to pay the cost of making the technology.

> ideal implementation of AI for Apple is probably to finally make Siri work

Wouldn't the simplest solution be to auction off Siri's back end the way Apple does Safari's search bar in iOS?

They keep banging on Siri hoping for a different outcome is insanity by definition. Voice is actually not a very good UI for most things, it isn't very private, it's prone to mistakenly think I'm talking to it, and is bad for dense info/info organization. Siri should only be activated very very deliberatly, not "Hey siri", and don't make it act like jarvis because you will not in the near future with the smarts it needs.

The thing which kills me is a lot of this was working back in the Newton days.

I felt the same way about NFT's. Its a cool protocol. Theres some cool stuff that could hypothetically be built on the protocol. Selling people NFT's felt like trying to sell someone a TCP or a DNS. The protocol is not the product lmao.

Exactly this. I use Siri for two things: remind me x at date/time and set a timer for x. And it even screws these up 10% of the time. If you make those work flawlessly but it also works with any app on the device I'm sold. I'd even buy a new device if it was limited to that. Let OpenAI and Anthropic worry about changing how we work in a revolutionary way. Whatever the outcome is there people still need great products to do ordinary things and that's where Apple has always excelled.

It's crazy to me that even with a strong accent ChatGPT can nail my voice messages. If Siri can suddenly do that (and there's no reason it can't anymore) the device becomes much more useful to everyone that doesn't speak English and doesn't have an American accent.

I have a grander vision for an ideal Apple “AI”: anti-AI.

I’m picturing a combination of on-board facilities and online services from the Apple cloud that Apple product holders could use to flag and filter LLM slop. As a value added prospect, iPhone users who read HN or used TikTok would be seeing clear UI-level indications of when they’re interacting with slop with options to kill it.

In my estimation it would provide platform benefits without losing capabilities, leverage Apples hardware and not advertising positioning, fix critical issues of spam and scams, and let them market a higher calibre of online experience. Also, they could un-eff Siri - “play album X starting at track Y”, come on, it’s 2026.

Shortcuts already lets you set up custom workflows you can trigger by voice.

Do people want that? I mean I don’t think it can discern if I say 15 or 50. Why would I leave that to chance that the ai properly grokked my message when despite what I’m guessing decades of work in the speech to text field, it is still pretty unreliable? Doing the task myself is trivial enough and 100% reliable.

Earlier today Siri notified me over and over again to message a particular contact on the GMail app. I have no earthly idea why this was important enough to notify me about, I can figure out whether I need to message people. It provided no hints what the contents of the message were supposed to be, or why I might need to message them now instead of some other time. 20yr ago when I worked in an industrial steel fabrication shop, a couple times a week someone would exclaim "shoot the fuckin' engineer that came up with that one!" usually regarding some bone-headed physically impossible weld on a plan or a procedure that would clearly result in an assembly being out of tolerance, but sometimes something more serious like a weak or dangerous design. Now we're well into the "shoot the fuckin' engineer" stage with tech products. Abusing people like this is wrong. Their attention is a finite resource. Their reward centers are vulnerable. Mindlessly pushing the buttons in the psychological control room of vast, diverse, and increasingly stressed populations is a profoundly stupid idea. If we're not careful somebody is actually going to start shooting the engineers. Would they be wrong to? I don't think the backlash against this shit is going to be small or subtle, and I'm honestly afraid to be associated with this industry right now. Y'all are playing with fire in the most reckless, clueless, thoughtless, and callous fashion. Be better. Stat.