Siri: It’s Time to Kill You!

In the past year, if you’ve been interested in Apple at all, you’ve probably heard about the company’s difficulties in the race for artificial intelligence. Apple has yet to deliver the significantly enhanced Siri that it promised at WWDC 2024, and Apple Intelligence, which debuted a little later than anticipated after the iPhone 16 launch, did not live up to expectations. Siri received a makeover and ChatGPT integration, but earlier this year, due to a number of alleged issues with Apple, its capacity to comprehend your personal context through emails, messages, notes, and calendar was “indefinitely” delayed.

Would people use Siri even if Apple produced a better version? Although Siri was the first to be released, iPhone owners have long viewed it as the butt of a joke, while Google Assistant and Alexa have become the industry standard. However, Apple should think about following Google’s lead and replacing the voice assistant with something new if it wants its users to take the alleged improvements seriously.

When things don’t work or priorities shift, Google has no problem shutting things down. Indeed, the search engine behemoth has a history of discontinuing so many of its services that a website exists specifically to keep track of all the gravestones. Google Assistant is among its most recent layoffs.

Google Assistant has been around for almost ten years, and it is currently being phased out of all the ecosystems it was a part of. Do you wear OS smartwatches? They will soon be replaced. During the upcoming months, Android Auto? On Android phones, it is already no longer the default assistant. We probably won’t see the branding anywhere by 2026. So, without a care in the world, the reign of what was arguably the most effective voice assistant of its time comes to an end.

However, it might have been a wise move for Google to discontinue it rather than continue using the Android Assistant name. “The main focus is branding,” says Chris Harrison, director of the Future Interfaces Group at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon. However, it highlights a technological factor, namely that the earlier iteration of these assistants wasn’t truly assistants. Not very sophisticated—just setting a timer and asking for the weather. Personal assistants aren’t really needed for those routine tasks. “.”.

The Gemini is a totally different animal. When combined with a camera-enabled device, it can comprehend what you’re seeing and provide assistance. It can also search through your emails to locate the location of your child’s soccer match and parse through large documents. Its capabilities are far more extensive than those of Google Assistant. Apple wants to accomplish the same goals in a more private manner, to prevent OpenAI from receiving your data when you have Siri connect to ChatGPT.

“It kind of atrophied out of the gate; Apple thought Siri’s capabilities would grow, but that didn’t really materialize,” Harrison says. These days, there is a new generation of devices that function more like assistants because they can reason and customize. Despite having voice interfaces and appearing to be similar at first glance, Google Assistant and Gemini are two distinct apps. “Merely changing the name to Google Assistant 2.0 wouldn’t encourage users to use it in a radically different manner. The move to Gemini appears to have been crucial in advancing customer understanding.

All of this might have been acceptable if Apple had fulfilled its assurance and released a working, significantly enhanced Siri at the time it had promised. It would have been a fantastic chance to impress users with a significantly enhanced Siri following a massive marketing campaign to make Apple Intelligence well-known (perhaps a regrettable move). After several months, users are still perplexed as to why Siri still lags behind despite its new appearance.

However, the user interface is the larger issue that affects all large language models, not just the branding. Harrison likens it to the graphical user interface (GUI) transition in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as the days of command-line computing. The latter gained more traction due to its explorable interface and discoverability rather than its visuals. You had to memorize how to do everything in the command-line era. If you put a graphical user interface (GUI) in front of a computer, anyone could figure out how to use the operating system.

If you place someone in front of Gemini or ChatGPT, tell them it’s a fantastic tool, and tell them to ask it anything, they will just stare at the blinking prompt without responding. The design of the interface seems to have regressed by thirty years. They don’t know what to say or do. Harrison claims that he conducted the exact same experiment with his parents: When they inquired about the weather for tomorrow, the AI replied that it was unaware of it.

“Our discoverability has regressed,” he claims. “If someone who isn’t tech-savvy has spent the last ten years using Siri to set timers and now has to think about it in a completely different way, that’s a really difficult problem. The application will likely need to be renamed in some way. “..”.

Considering that Apple has invested in Siri for over ten years, it would be a significant move to say goodbye to it. Nevertheless, the majority of people still use it to set timers, play music, and check the weather—they aren’t even pushing the limits of its comparatively constrained current capabilities. That is unlikely to change anytime soon, even if Siri’s feature-rich next generation does show up as promised.

Harrison claims that “this kind of AI revolution has completely gone over their head for 99 percent of the planet.”. Rethinking how we use these personal voice assistants will require time and education, similar to the ten-year shift from command line to graphical user interfaces. However, perhaps a new name will aid Apple in this transition.