I recently discovered that you need to have Siri enabled for Apple CarPlay. I expect we're going to see a lot of this where when you disable the AI functionality the devs won't have put in fallback states and you'll be effectively locked out. With CarPlay for instance there is no reason that I shouldn't be able to listen to my music or use the map without Siri. But things like responding to texts does rely on Siri, so just gate that piece. It is rather unfortunate.
I was very upset about this. I had a rental car and I needed to enter on the map where I wanted to go. Even with a damn keyboard it wanted Siri. It’s just gps and i had to dig my phone out and do the typing there instead.
Apple considers siri essential for CarPlay and I don’t really disagree. Don’t forget that a big part of the design of CarPlay tries to explicitly discourage tactile use while driving, with siri as the alternative input/output method.
I start my music and navigation route before leaving my garage, and any other interactions (volume up/down, skip song) are buttons on my steering wheel. What do I need voice input for?
(I use Android Auto, but it's basically the same thing for these purposes)
And Google considers necessary to report (using tactile use while driving) if there are blockages in the road, construction, lane closures, an accident, etc.
The discrepancy of using both with an iphone is disconcerting.
Interestingly, I have Google Assistant more or less disabled on my Android phone, but it still works when I have Android Auto enabled (which is fine by me since that's the one time that I ever want to use it).
I got the email that they're burying Assistant in September...
I use it on the phone to set alarms, add tasks or calendar events, I swipe up on the home screen to launch the app, and talk. For calendar, speech ("add calendar event dentist appointment on September 22 at 4pm") is even much more convenient than scrolling to the right month/date, using the UI to pick the time.
I'm currently vibe-coding a replacement app to use on-device speech recognition and setting alarms or adding calendar events. Sadly third party apps can't add stuff to Google Tasks without further interaction (or without OAuth) like Assistant/Gemini can.
Would be interesting to see anti competition law applied here, too. Essentially bundling the two together, leveraging the market for car play to gain adoption for Siri.
i feel relatively comfortable with carply + basic siri, leaving apple intelligence off. basic siri is pretty limited in scope of what it has access to and what it can do.
while it's an arbitrary line ive drawn, basic siri doesn't feel like "ai" in the same sense as context-aware assistants do for me.
With Apple intelligence turned on, when I take a screenshot on my iPhone, it wants me to do this search that goes to temu, instead of the text selection that it used to do. So I turned it off, but I have to turn it back on to have auto translation in iMessage.
Fallback states are generally a ton of work that don't benefit the direction that the PM or broader business would want to go anyway.
It's a pet peeve of mine that we often say "devs" when we really mean "the business". It seems to be gamers who started this language. They'll even call the publisher "the devs".
Such a cool guide to such a bizarre problem we live in…
Companies forcing features that nobody wants, but that are also expensive to operate and cost real money to run? Market can definitely stay irrational for long.
Nobody using it is actually the ideal outcome. AI features are added, at no additional cost to the consumer, to extract money from investors. If customers began using the product, this feature would actually start having an ongoing cost.
Imagine you make a widely hated product targeted at huge corporations. Workday, Jira, Oracle Financials, anything like that.
Then you find that all your users are using ChatGPT to automate their interactions with your product. Instead of your product being crucial to your customers' business and almost impossible to replace, it's turning into a dumb pipe connecting LLMs - and looking very much threatened.
After all, data lock-in is a core part of your business strategy.
Getting people to use your AI tool, though? That makes your product stickier, and lets you charge more too.
Thing with investor money is that after a while the investors start asking where their dividends are at. If you put all that money toward building features nobody asked for, you're in for a rough time.
I really do wonder if the market is being irrational or if we just cannot see what they are
I suspect that many people dislike AI but are begrudgingly using it. I would put money very few people are completely avoiding it. It's very hard to avoid now anyways.
Maybe the AI company strategy is really just "make it so invasive in life it's so difficult to avoid and expensive enough to revert that companies and governments will never go back anyways"
Nobody, absolutely nobody wants or likes overlapping rainbow animated "ask AI" buttons plastered over every available inch of screen space. Nobody wants or likes useful features being removed and replaced with colorful bouncing "ask AI" buttons.
I think people like AI tools when it's their choice to engage with them and they set the terms. I have a good experience with Claude largely because I choose when to use it and when I don't care about it's existence, its gone. But the stupid glowing, animated, overlapping Copilot button in Word is the dumbest thing imaginable. I don't want it, and I cant stop being reminded of it.
The simple distinction of pro vs anti ai isn't the root cause, its about individual control and choice which can span both of those stances.
If I personally wanted to use generative AI, I’d query an agent app on my computer or load ChatGPT in a browser. I wouldn’t want my email client proactively spewing random words into the text area on its own. And I certainly don’t want every bit of information on my screen continuously streamed to a corporate cloud server so that I can ultimately be profiled and surveilled.
The cloud jira is such a downgrade overall. You cant have reasonable markdown or date format, but have AI "make longer" torture button. And deceiving "improve description" AI button which just ... makes it pointlessly longer.
On Mac, you can use https://wairy.app (full disclosure, I made this) to check what you have given AI perms to do on your computer (knowingly or not), then revoke them.
Anyone know a good way to disable the ai summary on Google results? I know I should move over to kagi, but a ublock filter or something would still be nice.
`google.com##.hdzaWe` blocks the AI summary. This is better than udm=14 because it doesn't suppress the other sometimes-useful non-AI Google answer blocks.
So the next iteration of surveillance features is to silently double down on users that turn off surveillance, because why would they do that unless they have something to hide? Better flag this user for extra super-secret surveillance and an immediate notification to authorities.
It's a sad state of affairs when companies are cramming this unwanted garbage into every app putting the onus on the user to block, disable, unsubscribe, delete, edit and mitigate. Nobody asked for AI slop.
(I use Android Auto, but it's basically the same thing for these purposes)
The discrepancy of using both with an iphone is disconcerting.
I use it on the phone to set alarms, add tasks or calendar events, I swipe up on the home screen to launch the app, and talk. For calendar, speech ("add calendar event dentist appointment on September 22 at 4pm") is even much more convenient than scrolling to the right month/date, using the UI to pick the time.
I'm currently vibe-coding a replacement app to use on-device speech recognition and setting alarms or adding calendar events. Sadly third party apps can't add stuff to Google Tasks without further interaction (or without OAuth) like Assistant/Gemini can.
while it's an arbitrary line ive drawn, basic siri doesn't feel like "ai" in the same sense as context-aware assistants do for me.
It's a pet peeve of mine that we often say "devs" when we really mean "the business". It seems to be gamers who started this language. They'll even call the publisher "the devs".
Companies forcing features that nobody wants, but that are also expensive to operate and cost real money to run? Market can definitely stay irrational for long.
Imagine you make a widely hated product targeted at huge corporations. Workday, Jira, Oracle Financials, anything like that.
Then you find that all your users are using ChatGPT to automate their interactions with your product. Instead of your product being crucial to your customers' business and almost impossible to replace, it's turning into a dumb pipe connecting LLMs - and looking very much threatened.
After all, data lock-in is a core part of your business strategy.
Getting people to use your AI tool, though? That makes your product stickier, and lets you charge more too.
By then, a new fad will come in and you can just pivot to it.
We went from "engagement" (with no concrete plans to monetize said engagement), through a brief period of "blockchain" and now finally AI.
I suspect that many people dislike AI but are begrudgingly using it. I would put money very few people are completely avoiding it. It's very hard to avoid now anyways.
Maybe the AI company strategy is really just "make it so invasive in life it's so difficult to avoid and expensive enough to revert that companies and governments will never go back anyways"
It's just that another group of people absolutely hates the idea of AI and wants it to go away.
The simple distinction of pro vs anti ai isn't the root cause, its about individual control and choice which can span both of those stances.
If I personally wanted to use generative AI, I’d query an agent app on my computer or load ChatGPT in a browser. I wouldn’t want my email client proactively spewing random words into the text area on its own. And I certainly don’t want every bit of information on my screen continuously streamed to a corporate cloud server so that I can ultimately be profiled and surveilled.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/adios-alexa-for-sho...
Honestly ? Not a stressy move, the major things that changes is that the IA bullshit is gone
I'm remarkably free of any intrusive AI.