We were promised better Siri, better Alexa, better everything. Instead we’ve gotten… chip bumps.

The onrushing AI era was supposed to create boom times for great gadgets. Not long ago, analysts were predicting that Apple Intelligence would start a “supercycle” of smartphone upgrades, with tons of new AI features compelling people to buy them. Amazon and Google and others were explaining how their ecosystems of devices would make computing seamless, natural, and personal. Startups were flooding the market with ChatGPT-powered gadgets, so you’d never be out of touch. AI was going to make every gadget great, and every gadget was going to change to embrace the AI world.

This whole promise hinged on the idea that Siri, Alexa, Gemini, ChatGPT, and other chatbots had gotten so good, they’d change how we do everything. Typing and tapping would soon be passé, all replaced by multimodal, omnipresent AI helpers. You wouldn’t need to do things yourself; you’d just tell your assistant what you need, and it would tap into the whole world of apps and information to do it for you. Tech companies large and small have been betting on virtual assistants for more than a decade, to little avail. But this new generation of AI was going to change things.

There was just one problem with the whole theory: the tech still doesn’t work. Chatbots may be fun to talk to and an occasionally useful replacement for Google, but truly game-changing virtual assistants are nowhere close to ready. And without them, the gadget revolution we were promised has utterly failed to materialize.

In the meantime, the tech industry allowed itself to be so distracted by these shiny language models that it basically stopped trying to make otherwise good gadgets. Some companies have more or less stopped making new things altogether, waiting for AI to be good enough before it ships. Others have resorted to shipping more iterative, less interesting upgrades because they have run out of ideas other than “put AI in it.” That has made the post-ChatGPT product cycle bland and boring, in a moment that could otherwise have been incredibly exciting. AI isn’t good enough, and it’s dragging everything else down with it.

Archive link: https://archive.ph/spnT6

  • DominusOfMegadeus@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    171·
    14 hours ago

    I haven’t gotten anything of use from Apple Intelligence. Even just using it is difficult, and Siri is possibly dumber than she was before.

    • egrets@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      13 hours ago

      I’ve used the “writing tools” extensively for minor changes, like changes to capitalization on a large block of text. It makes the phone a little less of a consumption-only device.

      I’ve also found the image editing tools handy from time to time, and the automatic calls to ChatGPT on the more complex natural-language questions can sometimes be handy, even if you need to wait a while for the response.

      The notification summaries are sometimes very handy and sometimes absurdly incorrect and misleading.

      I’m really looking forward to Siri being less frustratingly stupid, but we’ve got a while to wait for that, and we probably shouldn’t set our expectations too high. I do respect that they’ve not shipped it rather than shipping something broken, though.