Xnor.ai’s Edge AI engine could be the thing that brings everything together. It’s unlikely that we’ll see any fruits from Apple’s purchase in the iPhone 12 or even the iPhone 13, but Apple’s incredible silicon advancements, coupled with the kind of on-device AI processing that Xnor.ai brings, could boost Siri’s capabilities in a big way. By embedding Edge AI into Apple’s own chip via the Neural Engine or a new co-processor, Siri could be faster and far more capable, learning from what you do and prioritizing tasks in kind. And it could all work offline, tapping into the tremendous power of Apple’s system-on-chip and doing the work of a powerful cloud right on the device.
MacDailyNews Take: Think privacy. On-device processing is the key to privacy.
Xnor.ai estimates that Edge AI runs 10 times as fast with 15X memory than cloud-based systems, and a responsive assistant dedicated to each specific phone could finally let Apple build a voice recognition system with near-perfect accuracy… By building a powerful AI engine directly on our phones, Apple could do the kinds of things with Siri we want it to do without compromising our privacy.
MacDailyNews Take: And, not just for iPhones, either. Siri on the Mac, HomePod, AirPods, and “future products” looks like it’s poised to make a very big leap thanks to on-device artificial intelligence via a greatly-improved Neural Engine. “Siri sucks” may finally fade from the lexicon someday soon.
Siri might seem to suck until you get into iOS Shortcuts.
For instance, I can say, “Hey Siri, Start Emergency Backups” and it will trigger a sequence of automations causing the main server at a client to do an unscheduled partial backup. I can do it from an anywhere there is an Internet connection. Or I can say “Hey Siri, (clientName) server status) and I will get back a set of pings showing the status of all servers.
A combination of Siri and iOS shortcuts and Python and/or shell scripts is an amazing thing.
Theloniousmac = my favorite genius
Thelonius, not all of us are as expert as you on such things as Python, or scripts. For example, I’ve always wanted the ability to take rows of data from Numbers, and put it into fields in Pages to print out as letters, invoices or forms. In the old days it was called mail merge. Nothing fancy, just put data into fields. Nothing in iOS seems to be able to do something this simple. Of course I’m not well versed in programming, so it may be over my head.
Siri should work well out of the box without the additional work needed to run it with shortcuts. It’s been a shit show from the start.
I’ve personally never had a problem with Siri, and I’ve seen numerous times friends and coworkers try “ok Google” resulting in error and frustration. However, I am excited to see what advancements Siri gets in the future!