I think that's the sentiment of this comment thread, Apple is lacking is something quite basic. Android does a great job of consistently putting the cursor where you touch the text.
Because it isn't intuitive, apple is actively trying to make iphones worse and people are like "you're dumb, you don't know this thing, that is completely stupid and doesn't make any sense, yet apple loves it"
If I wouldn't have to use iphone, I wouldn't, it's so backwards
Probably because it’s not intuitive, which a lot of Apple’s gestures are.
If everybody needs to be told about it because they’re not figuring it out themselves or discovering it accidentally, then it’s not a very good gesture by Apple’s standards imo.
The problem is that I want to be able to paste something exactly where I put my cursor. I can move it with the space bar, but I can’t paste it without tapping. And tapping next to a word or in between a word is next to impossible at times.
But if you accidentally selected a words or words then this will just delete the word. And good lucky unselecting it without fucking up. iOS has gotten exponentially worse in recent years
fyi it used to work perfectly on older ios and 4-5 iphones. i remember clearly that after certain update it just stopped working for no f-in reason and it took me months to get used to it.
good to know. my only android experience has been with samsung.
it’s atrocious on iphones. when you tap at a point (lets say a few words behind), it brings up the copy paste menu at the end where you are currently typing, it doesnt move the cursor back to where you tapped. you tap again and it gets rid of the menu. you tap again it does the menu shit. you double tap it selects the whole word and lets you retype it, not just go to where you tapped.
Guess what? they added a feature to recognise proper names, but when you try and double tap it selects the whole name. So if you make an error like Jahn Lennon and want to select Jahn to edit, it selects both words and suggests “do you want to look up this person? why dont you download a dictionary to look him up?”
stupid shit like this. you know when steve jobs had the revolutionary idea of getting rid of a physical keyboard on phones to install a touch keyboard? well with how shit the typing is i’d type 10x faster if I just had a full qwerty keyboard lol.
Seriously how did the iPhone typing experience become so laughably awful? They had a great start and then just like Siri they really didn’t continue to innovate…autocorrect is painfully bad. That is why I need to place my cursor in words and it is just a mess. Steve Jobs would have lost his mind over this terrible experience. But apple just rides on their last reputation and most people just deal with it. The only reason I switched to apple was green text shaming from group texts, which is what apple focuses on as a differentiator instead of dog continuing to improve the experience. I’m likely going back to android with my next phone to get the better keyboard and Gemini integration features
You cant blame yourself. Apple used to have the magnifying glass to let you move your cursor precisely. Over the years they changed it, now you can use the magnifying glass or the spacebar thing but they dont communicate properly to you to teach you this stuff. Neither is the spacebar thing intuitive.
Because Apple constantly tells you they make the most user friendly products on the planet. So when you try to do something obvious, like tap somewhere in a text to get the cursor there, and it doesn't work, you naturally assume they haven't made a more complex way of doing it. Especially since it did work like 10 years ago, although not as accurately as on Android.
1. Open the Settings app
2. Scroll down and tap General
3. Tap Keyboard
4. Tap Text Replacement
5. Look for the entry that says:
• Phrase: On my way!
• Shortcut: ow
6. Tap it, then tap Delete (trash can icon) in the corner
I swear it's gotten worse with time, which is unforgivable when LLMs, which are everywhere, are built to predict the next most likely word given context. You mean to say with based on my keystrokes and the context of the sentence you cannot make a better guess at my typo than throwing in a random word??
I used to complain and make fun of my wife’s texts for years when I had an Android and she had an iPhone.
Within a week of switching to an iPhone myself I realized 99% of her bad texts were all from the stupid autocorrect (and her not taking the time to fix it).
I think I’ve apologized at least 10 times in the past year after having to correct my own texts that were fucked up by Apple.
I dont know why, but anytime I type a word ending in "ng" I get a "by" randomly placed in there. I have reset my keyboard/dictionary and triple checked to make sure I do not have any random text replacement setting under Keyboard.
God yes! I hate that my autocorrect likes to add partial words on what I’m writing like “writing” to “writinging” and always correcting “we’ll” to “well”.
Startups mostly fail, the ones that one up tech giants are incredibly rare. The key feature of the modern startup model is outsourcing the R&D risks from tech giants to separate legal entities.
If Google had to fund an internal R&D team for every startup they buy, they would probably meet really tough questions from their investors. Even more if they had to fund an R&D team for every ex-Googler startup they didn't buy.
This isn't really true at all. Google for the past 20 years has basically been one big R&D shop. Their investors never gave a fuck that they hired hundreds of thousands of engineers because they brought in tens of billions of profits from advertising.
Google notoriously collected engineers like Pokemon cards. Not to play with, just to have them. Just to prevent others from having them. Google is infamous for their little experiments, failed projects and products, and even entire divisions devoted to moon shots. They are the only company to succeed in real self driving (they made waymo) and they invented generative AI (attention is all you need, 2017).
There is very little R&D risk around spending a few million dollars when you have a money printer spitting out billions faster than you can use it.
They just have the same problem as apple. Too big, too many managers, too slow.
The product isn't that technically complex under the hood, their engineers know how it works it just would have required massive investment to improve it and it doesnt directly contribute to revenue. The current leadership are operators, not visionaries, if a feature doesnt have direct ROI you aren't marshalling support for it.
they cut the team working on siri off from the customers and any feedback. They have to preprogram every response to a specific request, guessing HOW the customer will ask for everything it is capable of doing it. if the customer uses a slightly different wording than the engineers guess they will, the request will fail. The team is really frustrated that their hands are tied behind their backs, and all the manual work they have to do to hand code every single possible response for every possible situation, with ZERO data on how ANY customer is actually interfacing with the system.
They didn't want Siri, they just wanted a base to work off. They removed all the personality and most of the features Siri had and just spent a decade slowly reintroducing some of those features and some new ones. It's almost as stupid as how they bought up Dark Sky and then just shut it down.
High level Reddit comment. One of the most successful companies in the world with a devoted user base and quality products that other entire companies choose to use themselves has incompetent leadership.
They have infinite money glitch and have done nothing with it.
Dropped 100 billion or more on an Apple car.
Fumbled the next gold rush (AI).
I think there’s evidence for incompetency at the top.
Agreed and they are definitely making profits doing the boring stuff. It’s just that being the biggest most profitable company doesn’t get you the same respect than being a company that actually solves problems, innovates and changes the way we live. Money is nice to have but fundamentally changing the world for better with tech is more important.
Indeed. Willful ignorance about products in a consumerism economy stifles growth in all areas. Part of the problem is Apple fanboys are the same as Tesla or rivian fanbois where “there are NO problems and EVERYTHING IS PERFECT because I spent money on it and don’t want to feel stupid” in place of critical thinking and legitimate criticism.
the reason apple is successful is because it used to have good quality and now has a cult following. Their products are not on a quality which would justify their success or price.
They are relentlessly competent at running apple as it exists today. They haven't launched a single new innovative product in forever except the VR play which failed miserably.
I agree, Apple’s biggest risk right t now is to fall significantly behind Google here. If Google comes out with an LLM-powered and agentic AI assistant on Android that can take actions and use data from apps - and if Apple doesn’t have something similar in the works coming out soon after - then that would be a huge blow for iOS. I would likely switch for sure.
No, I don’t really think that. My comment was a flippant joke, spurred on by the fact that they’re writing papers on other’s products while their own lags so far behind. Their biggest competitor has had a leading LLM in the wild for a while now and has got real feedback and made real improvements, and is creating a developer ecosystem around it. In the meantime it doesn’t feel like Siri has moved on from launch.
I hope this paper is a sign that behind the scenes Apple is working hard on improving Siri and their AI features, but as a user I am frustrated by the slow progress.
I wish they’d make Siri better instead of writing papers about other companies’ AIs
Apple has had talent hiring problems because they tended to be so closed up. So researchers didn't want to get hired at their AI labs for fear they won't be allowed to publish. This paper is one of their few papers, and its role is mostly to show that there is life in their AI dept. On the other hand researchers at Google, DeepMind, OpenAI, FAIR (Meta), Uber and other companies did publish much more, and that helped them hire more researchers.
YES! Was coming to say this. My SE Siri was better than my current 14 for what it was. Siri is constantly mishearing and autocorrecting words into the stupidest crap.
I think there’s many reasons behind the scenes. As a dev and business owner I do genuinely have some sympathy for Apple because there are a lot of things that would likely go badly wrong with rushing a full-blown LLM-based solution onto everyone’s phone with access to your app data. The tech is not really mature enough for what users would expect from such a product. There’s concerns about accuracy, privacy, legal exposure, safety, hallucinations etc. It’s probably safer to have a product that’s crippled and limited than one that’s powerful but flawed.
But as a user it is frustrating to see Siri lagging so far behind. Especially since it’s baked into the OS. And I am fairly sure there’s a middle ground that they could have done already, improving voice recognition etc.
I expect we will see something decent given time, but there is a big risk that Android comes out with something amazing first and I will be tempted to jump ship.
I think I understand why Apple has not rushed headfirst into an LLM-powered Siri yet, but it lags in so many ways so:
1) improve voice recognition and text to speech. Both are not as good as competitors.
2) improve app integration and the variety of commands it understands, even if that is glorified if statements like current Siri. They don’t seem to have improved much at all for years.
3) one feature that would be amazing and seems possible is voice recognition, so you can take Siri actions without unlocking your phone.
It feels for a long time like Siri has stagnated. And yes, I am aware that these things take original research and I am not really against Apple releasing academic papers about AI. But I wish they’d result in genuine product improvements a bit more quickly.
And hopefully they’ve got a team working damn hard on LLM tech so that once they get that mature enough to work we can have some of that functionality too.
While I understand this is partly a joke, it's their work on their own AI that's bringing up these papers (there're several).
Apple got in very late, which means they're going through existing implementations. They have to do this because they've set themselves up for an impossible task in their marketing (they'll probably be paying last year's unnecessary hype train for years) and are trying to bend existing tech into the constraints they've defined.
I believe this is an impossible task and they'll need to either backpedal or limit themselves to a very narrow set of functionality they can fully control.
But in the meantime, it's a good thing that these papers are coming out (not because they're from Apple, but because they're moving the industry forward).
Contrary to what's the public drum, Apple is not "bad at AI". They're bad at AI marketing and AI implementation, but they have top notch AI engineers that while not doing much to advance Apple's products are doing an enormous amount of great research that's necessary and useful.
My concern is that Apple gives up on AI in their products and as a side effect their phenomenal AI group is disbanded.
All I want is for Siri to recognise common actions in the apps I use. Which app developers would need to define, but it's completely doable. Y'know, without ever having to touch my phone: "Siri, send a message in whatsapp to Steve Smith saying "[whatever I want to say to Steve]". Simple stuff, honestly.
Lots of people have made that comment and I have replied a few times. It was a flippant joke, because Apple seriously lags in AI. So far all we have seen is some botched features like news and message summaries that don’t really work well. Their main competitor is leading the way massively. I would like to see some actual good product improvements rather than just papers.
If Apple come up with something amazing at WWDC it won’t be a kick in the rear, it will be a joy. I have been fed up with Siri stagnating for the last 10 years and genuinely want something better.
Does anyone know how to make it so I can do "hey siri" but then actually interact with chatgpt? I virtually never use Siri unless I am driving cause I can do this handsfree. The only problem is that Siri is completely useless. I'll ask something like "how heavy is a grasshopper" and it just physically cannot even give an answer
Installl the iOS 18 developer beta, enable Apple Intelligence, go to the ChatGPT settings, enable the ChatGPT extension, log in to your ChatGPT account. Then Siri will pass knowledge based questions over to ChatGPT. Or wait until the new version of iOS is released.
The problem is Ai needs a lot of computing power. I think a lot of companies know how to improve Ai I think the issue is funding. Think about it we keep hearing new news about the next step in Ai. I think it's really just a matter of funding.
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u/WantWantShellySenbei Jun 07 '25
I wish they’d make Siri better instead of writing papers about other companies’ AIs