Apple Intelligence is wicked stupid!

TidBITS Talk
1

With it on I say “text Janie” and it says “what would you like to know about Jane last name?” With it off Siri does the right thing and says “what would you like to say to Jane last name?” Wicked stupid.

2

I can’t reproduce this with my Contacts, but I do wonder about your use of two different names (Janie vs Jane) as a factor.

3

Janie is a nickname for Jane. In any case I stand by my statement wicked stupid. “Intelligence” did get the person I wanted.

4

Well I couldn’t repeat it at home. Wondering if it was because I was in the car, where it did it multiple times…

5

You can always set nicknames up with Siri, works well.

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6

I think It should be mentioned that the changes to Siri in 18.1 and 15.1 were small and it’s not really using Apple Intelligence yet. The changes to Siri for 18.1 were:

  • A new look and feel includes a glowing light that wraps around the edge of your screen, animates responsively to the sound of your voice, and lets you keep scrolling or typing while you talk to Siri
  • Type to Siri when you don’t want to speak a request out loud by double tapping at the bottom of the screen
  • Richer language understanding enables Siri to follow along if you stumble over your words or change your mind mid-sentence
  • Conversational context is maintained over the course of a session, so you can refer more naturally to something you said in a recent request or something Siri mentioned in a recent response
  • Product knowledge helps you get answers to thousands of questions about the features and settings on your Apple products
  • Voice enhancements make Siri sound more natural, expressive, and clear

I think even 18.2 isn’t adding the full AI features to Siri (though I don’t follow the betas too closely), but what I understand is that Siri will now optionally use ChatGPT and Apple is adding visual intelligence to Siri with 18.2 and 15.2. I think it’s something like iOS 18.4 that will bring all planned improvements to Siri (things like the example given at WWDC answering the question “what time is my mother’s flight landing today”.)

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7

I’ve definitely noticed Siri doing much more natural voice inflection in responses. Really sounds shockingly good at times, with pauses and appropriate rising and falling of tone.

(It still doesn’t listen to your inflection and pronunciation, however, which is lame. Like if you say a name or town, Siri will repeat your dictation and still pronounce the name wrong. It should learn from how you say it!)

Another fascinating thing just happened a few days ago. I left on a trip and someone texted me, “Bon Voyage!” Siri started off in female voice in regular English, and then suddenly switched to a deep male guttural voice for the French phrase with such a strong accent I had to play it back several times just to understand it! (And I speak French. Though to be fair I was driving and had no context, so I wasn’t expecting French.)

I guess now when it sees phrases in another language it switches to that Siri voice and reads it in that language?!? It was very weird!

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8

Another stupid thing when connected in the car. I said “read new messages” as I always do and it said “2” and nothing happened. I turned off Apple “Intelligence”. Then it worked as always.

9

I’m enjoying what Apple Intelligence is bringing to Siri so far. Yesterday in the car I had the following exchange:

“Hey Siri, send a text to my mother.”
“You usually message XXXXXX with WhatsApp so I’ll use that, what do you want to say?”

Which was interesting and indeed welcome.

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