The best is ChatGPT voice mode. It understands non English words and accents amazingly well, and even though the LLM model isn’t the full fledged one, I can have deep conversations with it for an hour without it missing a beat.
But for one-on-one, it is a really outstanding experience. Especially since they tamped down the way over-the-top humanisms.
My preference, however, is for a voice-control UX just like I get with my Amazon Echo and "classic" Alexa like I have been for the past 10 years I've been using it: I think I can best describe it as a "voice-driven command-line" just like your OS' CLI shell, which makes its interactions predictable, even if it means I need to "know" what commands are valid in a given context. We all need predictability and reliability when it comes to my home-automation integrations.
...but computer interaction with a LLM / transformer-driven / "AI agent" is anything but predictable. When Amazon opted everyone into Alexa+ I agreed to give it a go and see if it really made things better or not - and it did not. I opted-out of Alexa+ and went back to something actually reliable.
I do like Gemini better than Assistant, even though it's not quite there yet. But that's just a matter of time because they actually designed it from the ground up to be a drop in replacement for Assistant.
I don't think that's part of their decision making, Liquid Glass moved most things around for seemingly not much else than novelty and that's not the first time.
They have done this before, release something large early in anticipation of a major shift and iron out issues before the shift happens. Liquid Glass started off a little janky but they appear to have been ironing out initial issues with each update.
I don’t think that cavalier attitude is universal at Apple and I don’t think the Siri PM wanted to break with their past respect for UX.
Liquid Glass was Apple’s logo change moment
The first problem is that it's just slow. If I want it to turn off some light, it takes a long time before responding.
But yeah, the failure to do basic tasks. I have a routine that I used to have it run (controls several devices at once). Now:
10-20% of the time it runs it.
60% of the time it says it's running it but it doesn't do anything.
20-30% of the time it says it can't do it unless I opt in to invasive permissions. And when I opted into them, it still failed about a third of the time. So I opted out again.
I have never had trouble setting timers with either.
But timers and smart home actions are definitely less reliable and sometimes take absurdly long to respond (like 20-30 seconds p99).
And now if I want to use Gemini on my phone I have to replace Assistant. Nah, I'll keep Assistant thanks, and just have a shortcut to load the Gemini in the browser.
Except the browser experience is so fucking buggy, constant reloads needed..
Any of the Whisper-based apps on the App Store.
WhisprFlow produces much better speech-to-text for long text messaging-by-voice (dictation / transcription) than apple's speech-to-text does. Whisper models in general seem to do a lot better than most built-into-OS/app models. Which is interesting, because there's nothing stopping them from just using Whisper models.
I love MacWhisper personally. Also, Gumroad is a fantastic app distribution platform for my personal values.
https://goodsnooze.gumroad.com/l/macwhisper
As far the "decision tree" side ... there's not much that can be done about that now. Agentic agents still go too "off-the-rails" to be productionized out to the billions of smartphones of the world. I'm working on voice-controlled agentic-with-rails AI features for my HomeAssistant, because Alexa / Google Home suck. But that's a hobby project and rogue AI actions only affect me, not billions of customers.
So if you buy Apple products based on that value proposition it’s a big problem for Apple if they can’t seem to keep their brand-promise in this area.
Still love not having google's paws all over my data, though, so not going back.
(It misunderstands my wife from California all the time, though.)
