How Siri Could Become the Mac’s New Help System

Article Comments
21

I appreciate the support, but I had exactly the same problems with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator when I still subscribed to Creative Cloud. Too many little icons!

I almost wrote a section about that. There’s no question that the chatbots do a pretty good job of offering suggestions, but they often suffer from not being able to distinguish what version you’re using, so it’s common to be told to use controls that no longer exist. The big advantage Apple would have is being able to peer into the app structure to some level.

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22

I may not care much about icons, but I can’t dictate at all, and the talking to AIs is a type of dictation. I write on screen, look at what I wrote, and rewrite until I like it. All people do not work in the same way. What works for some people will not work for others. This is a fundamental problem of any help system that is supposed to work for everyone.

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23

I think SIRI should be fired and Adam put in it’s place: he has excellent answers to most Mac questions and is definitely helpful!

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24

On the subject of useful user manuals, I always would buy David Pogue’s “The Missing Manual” when new MacOS versions were released. I’ve never been comfortable with online manuals because I have to launch them and they then cover up the application I’m having a problem with. I prefer a printed manual I can have open on the desk beside my Mac.

BTW, I just placed a pre-order for David’s new book “Apple: The First 50 Years”

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25

I’m 88 years old, and have been a Tidbits supporter for years. I remember Adam and Tanya making presentations at SDMUG in its infancy. I’m a retired musician who still uses music software, and now Final Cut ProX for making videos. For decades it has been so difficult getting support and answers to problems using this specialized software (and most everything else, for that matter). But in the last months, I’ve been able to go to Safari, ask a detailed question about using FCPX, Dorico, as another person mentioned, Logic etc. and get precisely the information that I need to continue my work! It’s fucking unbelievable. If I were still working for a living, this would be a life changer—so much time saved. So much more productive. I must be good at asking the questions, because I seldom get wrong or misleading answers. And it is not unusual to be asked if I want to dig deeper into the topic. I don’t know what Apple Intelligence is using, and I don’t care, I’m just happy that finally, some meaningful help has arrived after all of these years. True, it isn’t in-app, but Safari isn’t that far away. Hallelujah!

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26

It really feels that way, Miles. If what I want to do is my project, I want an answer so I can move on.

It’s worth mentioning that the Dorico docs writer weighed in on a thread about another user’s experience with using ChatGPT to get an answer that eluded them in the help files. The writer felt understandably defensive about their work, and pointed out all the links and subtle gems that they had buried in the system.

The point they were standing beside was we want to carry out our projects, not comb through documentation. The original Mac’s brilliance was grounded in the interface being self-evident. Controls and menus worked exactly as a user thought they should work.

Things have gotten much more complex in the past 45 years, and “the computer that you can use without looking at he manual “ now has both too much and not enough documentation.

Being able to ask a semi-knowledgeable question and get a focused answer is potentially Siri’s hidden superpower.

27

That was the basis for the tag line “The computer for the rest of us.”

28

Agree with everything you say, but you still have to be careful.

I just decided to install WhatsApp to follow some friends in France but was worried about the default install which grabs everything in your address book (it’s been that way since its inception) but I remembered catching somewhere that you could now limit the contacts it could harvest. So I asked Claude about that and it said that you couldn’t do it short of extreme workarounds. Hm, said I, let’s just do a web search. Lo and behold, IOS 18 put in the ability to select the contacts in the address book that an application can see. I pointed this out to Claude with a url reference and the response was, ≈"Gosh! You’re right. I’m out of date." :smile:

The responses from the more recent LLMs are getting really good but don’t go round assuming those responses have been run through the mill of tech writers, copy editors, and publishers who have a monetary interest in making the information correct and truly up-to-date. And when it comes to technical instructions that’s a big deal. Hand-waving around the true impact of Mongol horse manure on Turkic agriculture in 1200 has a little more LLM wiggle room.

:blush:

Dave

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29

I have been thinking about this for ages, but there are two problems:

One is that, like all data, metadata is usually what is missing.

Two, the desire to do it.

Machine learning is at its best when presented with a good data set that is tagged, where relationships and patterns can be deduced, so that meaningful output can be generated.

My feeling is close to Adam’s, in that the information should be apparent from scanning the application itself. Every menu item, every button, every function, needs a structured way to declare itself to the help system. Notwithstanding that writing a manual for your own SW makes for much better code (because you plainly see the absurdities you have made for yourself), this form of declaration could be easier to write and maintain. It might even be made compulsory in the App Store eventually.

I envisage a table of entries declaring properties such as purpose, starting conditions, appearance in the UI, the transformation applied, reversibility, version limitations, etc. ML specialists can better devise ways to design this metadata for the model they use. There are many possibilities. The primary goal, from the user’s POV, is always purpose and meaning.

Awards were won in the past for the quality of Apple’s documentation, but I see no desire to even attempt this level of commitment today. Ex-Apple people have often commented of understaffing of SW development, and I think the corporation no longer institutionally cares about this, seeing the state of their developer documentation.

Yes, superior help and discoverability would be a valuable asset for burnishing the value of the platforms, but does a $4T corporation even register this factor? The idealist visions of the founders are long gone.

30

Mostly. I remember a lot of people being very confused by the trash can’s dual “throw things out/eject a disc” functionality. “This isn’t going to erase my disc, right?”

31

Nooooooooo! :exploding_head: :grin:

This is a really important point. If you ask a chatbot about something that matters and you don’t see it doing a search while building the answer, follow up with “Confirm with a search.” That forces it to go out and double-check against current results and produces either confirmation or a mea culpa and new answer.

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32

That sounds worryingly like a strategy my wife could use profitably with me. :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

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33

That’s part of the Apple Spouse feature in OS 26.4, which we’ll keep discussing over here: :slight_smile:

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34

Yes, and my reflection on the experience I related is that everything I asked was circumscribed and could be sanity-checked. I think what @ace is suggesting is in a very different sphere from the “Let’s have Claude write program code for us.”

I’ve had a couple of frustrating experiences where I experimented with asking ChatGPT to propose formulas for Apple Numbers. It was really good at sounding plausible, and even better at hallucinating solutions. The most common one was conflating Numbers’ capabilities with those of Microsoft Excel.

The third thing it was good at doing was “Sorry/Not Sorry” responses when challenged.

The great thing about Dorico’s online help is that every article includes tags for the versions to which it applies. I can see where a tightly-trained, internally hosted AI reference tied to Siri would avoid version and platform errors.

35

The Trash Can was a whole lot of paradigm hurt because of that.

When Microsoft introduced Windows 95 they included a “Recycle Bin” as a sort of dig at you/not copying you gesture. It was, of course, even more obtuse.

But of course I’ll stand with the “mostly” crowd here. Somewhere deep in storage I have the spiral bound manuals for my Mac SE, and the pages don’t have any signs of wear.

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36

It was weirder than that. The “Eject” menu-bar command would eject a disc, but leave it mounted (as a grayed-out icon) on your desktop.

The intent was so people with only a single floppy drive could perform actions that should require two drives (e.g., copying a file from one floppy to another). You could eject one disk, insert another, and then drag an icon to the grayed-out floppy. The system would then eject media and prompt for the other disc as necessary.

In the context, dragging to the trash made sense - it would remove the icon from your desktop in addition to ejecting the media. But most people were not geeky enough to figure out/understand/approve of that paradigm.

Interestingly, Apple eventually resolved this (sort of) in Mac OS X (not sure which version) by making the Finder’s trash can change to an “eject” logo when you’re dragging a storage device.

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37

I’d forgotten about the copying thing as the motivation, but in any case the example definitely undercuts the point that the original MacOS was so obvious that it was self-evidence to any user.

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38

That’s one reason why an AI-based voice recognition system could be revolutionary. Everyone just talks to it at their level. The physicist can use big words and jargon, and the layperson can use every word, and the AI will understand.

If some people want advice or help and others want the AI to actually do the task for them, the AI can accommodate both options.

39

The most successful use of AI I have seen is Otter.ai’s transcription of interviews of people who speak English with a thick accent. However, I think the Otter system may benefit from not having to respond in real time. I can understand recorded interviews better if I play them back at half of three-quarters speed.

On the other hand, the AI system TurboTax is using for customer “support” when I called last night was an almost total failure. I tried to explain that TurboTax would not accepting my Activation Code but it could not understand that. Nor would it understand “human,” only offering to send me instructions. When I finally accepted the offer for instructions, the link it sent me was to a dead page. That is fairly typical of my experience with speech recognition from help lines, but it might be because people calling help lines usually are already annoyed.

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40

Hopefully if anything like this is in the works, it will be much more inclusive than software. Apple wants people to use their entire system of devices and now have unified the OS system version numbering. Getting the iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch and iMac all on the same page is a herculean task (and I mean the stable cleaning one). The Apple advice is always the same: wipe everything, update to the latest system on all devices and then restart them all.