>Apple can play since they control OS and hardware, but at the moment they appear pretty far behind in the AI aspect.
I disagree strongly with this, and it has everything to do with how we conceptualize AI.
I get in my car and plug in my iPhone. CarPlay immediately causes the Maps app to pop up and route me to my next meeting. I can say "hey siri, set a reminder to call Mr. Jones at 3:00" and she will gladly comply. If my buddy texts me while I'm driving to the meeting and asks if I'm free for golf tomorrow, she will automatically try to pin that on my calendar. I can throw out lots of examples here, but you get the idea.
Now granted, voice recognition in Siri has been pretty bad. She struggles with a lot of basic things, like putting on the music I request. But, there's no question in my mind that these augmented reality moments are where AI is actually making a difference in our lives and represent the actual business opportunity bridgeheads. In Apple's case, they not only already control the hardware (the phone, the watch, the earbuds, the tablet) but they've also figured out how to start bridging this into other hardware like a vehicle.
The impressive ML is ML that’s part of daily life. Even as I tap on this iPhone’s keyboard, button regions (tappable, not visible) slightly change in size depending on what it predicts the next letter would be. No one calls this “AI” yet it’s the same tech, and arguably more beneficial for the society as a whole than “AI” as a dedicated commercial service purpose-built to launder copyrighted creative works for profit (which is what AI is in the eyes of an ordinary person these days).
And yet the iPhone keyboard has gotten worse than it was a few years ago. I used an iPhone 8 years ago, and when I got an SE last year the keyboard was too smart, and so I disabled all the AI features.
Conversely, I've recently had Apple software mess up in a whole bunch of different ways:
• Maps doesn't understand that I don't own a car, defaults to driving sometimes
• Autocorrupt rather than autocorrect
• Calendar suggestions only work for the simplest of dates, so it suggested an event for the wrong month
• One case where it seemed to think the only timezone in the world was California
(It's not all negatives: for me, Apple has the least wrong voice transcription AI, and I do like their computational photography and definitely the ability to select text in images and Safari's website translation — but even then I don't think they're way ahead of the rest with these things, and website translation was definitely behind).
I suggest you try the assistant features on a Pixel 8 Pro. They have all the features you mentioned (except the creepy eavesdropping golf one) and the interaction is miles ahead, especially the text to speech.
I do not have any Android products, I only use Google Assistant through my Sonos speakers. Do you know if that code is different from that on the Pixel? (Because my experience of Google Assistant is long from good/useful, it struggles with basic tasks, I have to overpronounce to be sure it can differentiate “lights on” from “lights off”, etc etc.)
I don't know, because I haven't used Sonos for this purpose. But it's easy to imagine that a mobile handset with an array of microphones that you tend to hold near yourself would be more suited at the hardware level.
I disagree strongly with this, and it has everything to do with how we conceptualize AI.
I get in my car and plug in my iPhone. CarPlay immediately causes the Maps app to pop up and route me to my next meeting. I can say "hey siri, set a reminder to call Mr. Jones at 3:00" and she will gladly comply. If my buddy texts me while I'm driving to the meeting and asks if I'm free for golf tomorrow, she will automatically try to pin that on my calendar. I can throw out lots of examples here, but you get the idea.
Now granted, voice recognition in Siri has been pretty bad. She struggles with a lot of basic things, like putting on the music I request. But, there's no question in my mind that these augmented reality moments are where AI is actually making a difference in our lives and represent the actual business opportunity bridgeheads. In Apple's case, they not only already control the hardware (the phone, the watch, the earbuds, the tablet) but they've also figured out how to start bridging this into other hardware like a vehicle.