Littlebird vs Siri with Apple Intelligence

1. Finding the meeting in my emails was a win for Littlebird. It came back with who the meeting was with, when it was scheduled for, and what it was about. Siri said ‘I couldn’t find any emails about an online meeting today. However, I did find a calendar event’ and gave details of that. It was the right meeting, but it should have found the email.
2. Littlebird had the edge on appointments, though both found the same things. It told me how it had prioritised. It correctly gave a straight appointment a higher priority than one labelled ‘can miss.’ And it separated off a couple of items correctly as being reminders rather than appointments. Siri said it had started with the most important ones, but then just listed them in date order.
3. A Littlebird triumph on research. It gave me a clear summary (‘headline numbers’), a three paragraph description for each country and some suggestions as to why the difference in energy use between the UK and the US was so large (I hadn’t asked for this, but it was interesting). It gave good sources for the data with links, and the figures it gave matched those on the sources. (I never use information from AI research without checking this.) Siri totally botched the request, I’m afraid. Its entire response was ‘In 2022, the average US home purchased 10,791 kilowatthours (kWh) of electricity. For the UK, the average domestic electricity consumption was 3.4 megawatt-hours per household in 2022.’ It didn’t provide half of what I asked for (overall energy use). It was odd that it didn’t use the same units for the two figures. There was no context. And where Littlebird gave me links to check its sources, Siri just said which organisation provided the figures with no links.
4. Linking to a non-Apple app was not impossible for Siri – but it got things wrong. Littlebird did exactly what I asked – told me next week’s tasks and added a new one. Siri did manage to interface with Things, but searched for tasks with the words ‘next week’ in and wasn’t able to add a new task as part of the same request. When I separately asked it to do so it was able to add a new task, but commented ‘I couldn’t find any tasks scheduled for next week in Things.’
5. Littlebird was able to give suggestions when asked about ‘the blog post I’m currently writing’ (though it first guessed the wrong one of three that I’d recently edited). For Siri, I selected the text and used the Siri context menu to ask for suggestions. Littlebird spotted 6 typos to Siri’s 4 (though one of Siri’s was its own typo of kilowatthours in the quote). Both suggested the summary table below (though Littlebird drafted it for me and Siri didn’t). Littlebird also suggested half a dozen useful content improvements, including pointing out what was missing (I hadn’t filled in points 4 and 5 in this section at the time), and acknowledging potential bias.

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