Siri recordings are uploaded to the cloud for transcription, and reviewed by third parties to improve transcription and the AI. It also can arbitrarily decide to query search engines to answer questions.
So, better, but nowhere near "on the device only".
Siri does more processing locally than Alexa does, but does upload to the cloud, and depends on the cloud, both for analyzing the statement and for accomplishing it. It can then execute local actions. The info uploaded to the cloud includes essentially all the relevant data for the query, so it doesn't particularly help with privacy -- it's just not the raw waveform.
But Siri sucks for MANY reasons, and not just technical ones. It does worse processing but also does worse cloud integration, and now vs. alexa, has a far worse ecosystem around it (alexa "skills" are pretty awesome, and trivial to create)
I think a big part of this, at least when compared to google, is Siri's issues with language understanding rather than converting the audio to text. Google is much better at picking up on contextual details simply because they have such a huge background in doing so for search.
I think it's more like an iPad with a better microphone (well, 7 or 8 actually). When Siri can hear you clearly, it's much better at most tasks in my experience. The problem is often that it can't hear you clearly...
Doesn't Siri try to do on-device voice analyis? I thought the promise of Apple was not to upload your data to improve their systems (hence their ML systems aren't that good).
You can adversarially frame "ability to intelligently answer questions" or act as an "intelligent assistant" to "ability to search google" but those are different things. I'm comparing the use case of the former as an end user.
Siri will often uselessly "find results on the web and send them to my iPhone". Google can answer more queries directly as well as do basic timer setting stuff. The thing you're missing is the implementation detail is irrelevant to the end user, it's an issue of capability.
Your point about Apple being worse at cloud is partly what I'm talking about (and one of the reasons siri is so much worse). It's why Apple has not done a good job with this up until now. I don't buy the "it's intentionally not capable/bad by design because that's what they were going for" argument.
My prediction is Apple will make some sort of move here. Whether that's an investment in stable diffusion or something else I don't know. I expect what they do to have an apple flavor (on-device, privacy focused), but I think it will be leveraged to make Siri actually useful (and more of an actually intelligent and capable assistant).
Siri, G Assistant, Alexa, Bixby, Sonos all perform at least some locally. It seems the major issue is large dictionaries (eg music libraries) or complex queries. Most had an article about how basic features (times, smart home) work entirely on device.
From Apple's website: "processing is done by remote servers, it requires a data connection"
From Apple employee: "only collects the Siri voice clips in order to improve Siri itself"
Which is basically what Google says.
EDIT: both companies have promised "off-line" processing, whatever that means, but I don't know if any already does that. Note that off-line processing does NOT mean they won't store your voice clips on their servers.
Depends on if they implement some form of function calling, really. If something like a 7B Mistral fine-tune had access to search and various applications, I imagine it would perform fine and better than Siri.
Siri is a much better assistant then Alexa. It’s a hands down better product with much better tech. Things I say to alexa have to be in an exact phrase, whereas Siri can pick up on multiple different phrases containing the same meaning
Google's voice assistant is an interface to google cloud applications.
Siri is an interface to a limited set of the apps on the iPhone.
These are fundamentally different architectures for how how each was designed along with implications for privacy and where the company has compute resources that can be used.
If you are after a general knowledge search engine, Google will certainly out preform Siri.
Google has better cloud integration for a lot of their functionality. Apple doesn't have that amount of cloud resources that it can use and is a device first company rather than a cloud first company.
If you want to say "android can search google better" Ok. I'll grant that. If that makes it "smarter" - ok. Android is smarter than Siri because it can search google better.
If you want to say "android can control apps on its phone better" - I really want to see evidence that the ability for Android to control 3rd party music apps (e.g. Spotify) or report the weather or calendar or set up alarms... I don't believe that android is any better than Siri in that regard.
If you want to chat with it (e.g. "what is the answer to life the universe and everything?") then those are cute responses that are programmed in.
Do you have other criteria that you are using to compare the different devices other than its ability to search Google?
Unlikely. Volume of voice input for Siri probably is still orders of magnitude larger than those Alexa or Google Home handle. It also does so internationally and multilanguage. Once you start looking closely advantage is not really that big. Google, Alexa and Cortana also mishandle queries and they might excel at some tasks but fall short in others. Still a lot of room to improve for everyone, Apple included, but I would argue they are all in a very similar situation.
Reports indicate Siri computes primarily in the cloud (the whole sound file is sent), and that it's not on iPhone 4 for other reasons (e.g. reduce server load, increase 4S sales)
It's most valuable feature is the novelness of it - it is likely being used by over a million people right now. I assume that Apple is tracking result click-throughs to guess when Siri is providing (or actually, not providing) the right answer to your query. This should mean it'll become exponentially better over time.
So, better, but nowhere near "on the device only".
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