APPLE

AI is changing the world and Apple is wasting time with Siri

ChatGPT has accelerated the rise of artificial intelligence in everyday life and things are bound to get better in the coming months. At the same time, Apple lags far behind its competitors in AI.

In recent months, we have seen new types of AI capable of doing things unimaginable a year ago. These new AIs are changing the way people interact with technology and many companies are investing in this sector.

Apple had entered the world of AI with Siri, but later the problems and limitations of the virtual assistant emerged. Officially introduced in 2011 after the company acquired the technology from a startup in 2010, Siri was initially able to understand a series of commands to help users search the web. Apple had ambitious plans for Siri, and therefore added it as a feature of the iPhone 4S.

For the time, Siri’s capabilities were quite impressive, albeit limited. Siri could show you the weather, set a timer, search the web, call someone, play a song, or create a reminder. All based on voice commands. Apple always said this was just the beginning, but to date Siri has never reached its full potential despite the initial advantage over everyone else.

In fact, years have passed and very little has been added to Siri. Over time it has acquired some new tricks, support for new languages ​​and new interfaces, but never anything revolutionary. Also, immediately after the launch of Siri, everyone became interested in voice assistants and quickly Apple’s competitors announced their own versions of Siri.

Google launched its own Assistant, Microsoft invented Cortana and Amazon Alexa. But while these companies have worked hard to make their assistants smarter over the years, Siri has remained essentially the same as it was in 2011.

And nearly 12 years after Siri was announced, artificial intelligence has become more advanced than ever. This year, tools like ChatGPT have shown how virtual assistants can think and even create new content rather than simply providing short answers to obvious commands.

In short, artificial intelligence is changing the way people interact with technology and Apple is lagging behind with Siri.

More recently, Microsoft has announced that it is porting GPT-4 to its Office productivity suite with a new “Copilot” feature. With this feature, users will be able to do things like open PowerPoint and ask the app to create a complete presentation just as described by the user command. And while these companies are already shipping products with a new generation of virtual assistants, Apple remains stuck with Siri.

Apple has always promised in its presentations that Siri would get better and smarter. But this practically never happened. According to multiple reports, the team behind Siri is simply unable to improve the assistant due to the way it was initially built.

When Siri was released with iPhone 4S, Apple basically implemented the code it had acquired from the startup. The idea was to ship the product and then work on a new version for the future. But over the years, the company it simply added small updates to the original Siri code instead of actually working on a new version of the assistant.

The result is that the Siri code is now a mess, and what many sources are saying is that nobody at Apple really wants to change it. Not surprisingly, most of the assistant’s answers are predefined and not really based on artificial intelligence. Apparently, now something is moving and Apple engineers are testing Siri functions closer to ChatGPT, but we don’t know if and when these improvements will be made.

Apple is known for almost never being the first to release a feature. But in this case, the company is far behind its competitors. Siri is currently a “toy” compared to other assistants and ChatGPT, as confirmed by complaints from users.

For many, Apple seems to have already perso the battle of the virtual assistants. While it tries to make Siri better, its competitors are already launching new assistants that can create natural language text, images, and even create new software.

Maybe it’s time Apple stopped trying to improve Siri and worked on something new. Because Siri is probably unrecoverable.

by: Giuseppe Migliorino