Siri Product Knowledge
Thinking back to Apple’s statement to John Gruber boasting about Siri product knowledge, and Gruber rightfully pointing out on Mastodon that product knowledge isn’t very accurate, or helpful. I figured this was a time where I should at least try to use it. I already knew there was a support document, so it should at least send me to that.
That is what product knowledge is, after all, it’s a thing that displays part of the Apple Support document. It’s only display one thing, but it’ll do it with absolute certainty. A deep-link to the Tips app will take you right to the documentation, but you can’t share the document from the Tips app even though it also exists online at Apple’s own website. Also, for some reason, there are differences between Tips and the web, like the part about the Files app is in the web version of the document, but absent from Tips even in the latest iOS 18.3.2. If you’re looking up something on behalf of someone else and plan to send instructions to them it’s better to do that from the web, using a real search engine.
[…]
If I typed “How to scan and email a document?” it gave me some abbreviated, generic instructions from the world famous scannmore.com to open any email app, and add an attachment. This is quite useless because it isn’t relevant.
[…]
This isn’t LLM-AI-AGI-GPT-Multi-Modal stuff. This isn’t trillions in funding and melting a glacier. It’s the kind of logic you’d use in a search engine where relevance comes into play. This doesn’t require years of research into a new field of study. Typing this in the blank address bar of a web browser is the level of technological advancement that outpaces Siri. Siri can’t be this picky about syntax when no one else is.
Previously:
- How Apple Fumbled Siri’s AI Makeover
- Apple Delays “More Personalized Siri” Apple Intelligence Features
Update (2025-08-20): John Gruber:
This answer certainly describes one possible way that using multiple iPhones with iPhone Mirroring should work, but as an answer for how it actually does work, it’s abject nonsense. There is no “list of available iPhones” in the iPhone Mirroring app. If there were such a list to choose from, I’d never have had a question about this whole fucking thing in the first place.
1 Comment RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
I know this is kind of old now but it was linked from a recent Pixel Envy post.
And it does not appear to have gotten any better since. One of the very first things I found ChatGPT very useful for was reading documentation from companies like Microsoft and Apple to just give me a short answer. Microsoft's documentation is ancient and dense and it had clearly been trained on it, and Apple has fairly good and open documentation so if it's a question they have answered it's usually fairly straightforward where to look.
By that logic Apple should have nailed this easily and early. As Gruber points out, search engines used to actually be able to do this. Even Apple's own platforms prided themselves for decades on a useful help menu with a search field that takes you straight to the relevant options.
