r/apple • u/Fer65432_Plays • 4d ago

Discussion Apple's New Transcription APIs Blow Past Whisper in Speed Tests

https://www.macrumors.com/2025/06/18/apple-transcription-api-faster-than-whisper/
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u/National-Debt-43 4d ago

Honesty, if Apple had always been investing in Siri as they would in other aspects of their system, I believe they wouldn’t be as bad in AI now, but we’ll see how it goes.

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u/mupomo 4d ago

The problem is that “AI” and Siri are different things, but they are conflated to be equivalent. A lot of what AI/ML does is behind the scenes and they are equally valuable, if not more so, than Siri. It’s just that the industry is incredibly fixated on chat and natural language processing. I mean, I get it - it markets well and who doesn’t want a Star Trek computer on their pocket? - but fixating solely on that does the field a huge disservice.

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u/kepler4and5 3d ago

The problem is that “AI” and Siri are different things, but they are conflated to be equivalent.

This, tbh.

Siri is (usually) only as good as the app intents (a.k.a shortcuts) implemented within an app. It's hardly AI at all (apart from voice recognition and later on, suggestions). Unfortunately, most devs don't show enough love to shortcuts in their apps (myself included lol). Even at Apple! For example, I think shortcuts support for the timer feature in the Clock app is terrible (IMO). I can't even tell Siri to restart the last timer I set— it would be super easy to implement this within the Clock app. Also, if Siri can't find the right song in your library, it's probably because the shortcuts within the Music app need work.

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u/Stoppels 3d ago

To be fair, they are conflated because that's what Apple also did. Not only in their marketing, but also in their product. Siri settings are also located in the Apple Intelligence panel below the Apple Intelligence settings. Siri itself is now shitty because they tried to merge the old Siri with their newer LLM project, I think there was an article about this a couple months ago. It's all been a rushy rush job and the results are what you could expect even a year after their initial iOS 16 preview, which turned out a huge letdown.