Short answer: Ben Lerner, who worked on natural language processing at Google, says Siri has not gotten substantially better in years and the upgrade to Gemini is exciting. He notes many people from that part of Google moved to Apple.
Watch this answer from Episode 27 (starts at 17:17) · Episode 27 notes and transcript
From Episode 27: We Let AI Control Our Data Warehouse — The Results Were SHOCKING, starting at 17:17.
Jordan Metzner [17:16]: But I think the first one is, Apple signed the deal with Google, and obviously, now Gemini is gonna be powering Siri, and obviously probably powering Android as well through Google. But, yeah, I just wanna talk a little bit about Gemini, Apple, Android, maybe even a little bit too. But, yeah, just, and obviously, I mean, we use all the models here internally as well, but I think we've seen, some things where Gemini has performed well, and other places, it obviously hasn't been a top tier model yet compared to some of the other models on the market. Love to hear your thoughts there.
Ben Lerner [17:49]: I think so I have opinions on this. I used to work on natural language processing at Google, and a lot of the folks that I work with well, it's been a few years, but some of those folks and the code that I used to work with transformed into Gemini eventually. And, like, I'm very, very excited to see this. I think Siri is one of the voice assistants with a lot of mind share and a lot of you know, like, lots of usage. Like, lots of people use it, but realistically doesn't seem to be something that's gotten substantially better over the last few years. So, like, I don't have so much of an opinion on, like, should they have gone with Gemini? Should they have gone with Anthropic, I think, or, OpenAI? I think all of these models are keeping pace with each other. And, any given month, like, one might be a little bit ahead. But, like, I think the upgrade from Siri to Gemini is is super exciting.
Ben Lerner [18:41]: If they really leverage it, I think there's gonna be a lot of cool stuff. And I also have a little bit of inside baseball, which is all of this is public. Like, a lot of the folks from that part of Google moved over to Apple. So I kind of assume that they're of, yeah, we can do things internally and try to catch up, but maybe not that, but we can also just sign this partnership, which like, I think it's gonna be great for Apple users and, talking on AirPods into a MacBook. So, like, I will probably benefit in this as well.
Jordan Metzner [19:14]: No. I totally agree with you. I think it's obvious that, like, things like speech to text on an iPhone is pretty poor. And, I mean, almost every LLM app has a much better, speech to text model and transcription and duration, and it's unfortunate. And, like, Siri's not smart at all or hasn't been historically. I think the same almost the same thing happened with, Amazon and Alexa. Right? Like, they just kind of lost market shares. They weren't able to keep up with, AI at the edge. Right?
Ben Lerner [19:44]: Yeah. For sure. I would, maybe politely phrase that as well as really great at shipping hardware. So excited to see, like yeah. I think it'll just be awesome to have, like, a smarter voice assistant, like, actually work in your headphones and your phone and all that.
Jordan Metzner [20:00]: With a friend about something, we said, like, okay. Well, we'll see what happens in a year. And I would just I told Siri to, like, remind me in the year, but she couldn't really, like, do that well, like, within our text message chain. You know? So, yeah, I think, those things with well integration like into the Apple ecosystem, obviously, will just create for a much more, enjoyable experience on probably all Apple devices, but definitely an iPhone.
