Recently, I’ve bought my first iPhone, 4S. S is for Siri, they said.
I was considering of buying an iPhone 4, which looks good to me, but preferred iPhone 4S, because of two things:
- its better camera
- and Siri
While camera is overall great, and I’m happy with it, Siri is a great disappointment.
I was sold on this smart Voice Assistant thing, but it turned out to be useless.
- First, it does not work offline. I have a great 3G connection, its fast and reliable. (And also — surprisingly — quite cheap!)
- But even having constant internet connection, it’s mostly useless!
Expectations#
When I was choosing between two models, I’ve been thinking Siri is the next generation ground-breaking technology. I imagined I’ll do everything with my voice only, but it wasn’t the case.
Siri struggled to understand me, most times. I have no clear accent, and my English is a blend of American English and German accent. I’m not the clearest voice in town, yet it shouldn’t have so much trouble understanding me. Many times, I’m forced to repeat my requests.
This situation got better over the years, clearly they were improving the model at Apple. If it didn’t become more useful, at least it started to understand me.
I expected the voice assitant to actually assist me, yet it became the biggest disappointment Apple delivered. Considering I’m the owner of the infamous MacBook Pro 2011 with faulty dGPU. There, at least my MacBook served me a couple of years and I squeezed some money out of it.
Siri, it was a straight deception. Buying my first iPhone, I wasted a couple of extra dollars on the thing that was never delivered.
It’s Christmas 2024 — ho-ho-ho — and I’m still see mostly no use in Siri. It’s almost 13 years later, and it’s still useless!
Back to the Future#
Fast-forward in time, it’s the end of 2024. I’m borrowing a modern iPhone, and turned this voice assistant on. (I forgot to turn it off.) I noticed it’s working offline. Possibly, it’s for some very limited tasks, like setting my timer. Which is the only thing I use Siri for.
The issue with Siri is that I’ve been (not) using it for all these 13 years. I kept iPhone as my primary smartphone all this time, with some exception of rocking Android phone for half a year, probably.
Due to its marvellous Google Assistant.
Yet, still, Siri was useless to me.
While Google Assistant was a great toy I used, actually.
Future#
It’s been announced that since Late 2024, Apple would introduce new generation AI in their iPhones (and probably other devices too). That’s ChatGPT integration with Siri + some generative AI.
I hope against hope, this time they won’t ship half-baked non-functional junk.
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