Thanks to ChatGPT and other services, the AI race is hotter than ever. But Apple and Siri are still noticeably absent — and it’s not a good look.
Apple entered a new era at WWDC 2023 with the introduction of its Vision Pro mixed reality headset. Some are calling it the next iPhone moment. And yet, Siri — an iconic iPhone innovation that wowed the world in the early days of Apple’s smartphones before being eclipsed by Alexa and Google Assistant — barely left a mark at a conference that was otherwise brimming with ambitious announcements.
Apple barely gave Siri an opportunity to shine, unlike how Google and Microsoft have gone about hawking their AI thingamajigs in the past few months. With the arrival of iOS 17 and iPadOS 17, the only two changes making their way to Siri are a shorter activation command and conversational capabilities.
Instead of saying, “Hey, Siri,” users can now just utter the assistant’s name without any ”hello” or “hey,” and the AI assistant will do its job. Next, we got conversational capabilities, which means you can talk to Siri and shoot multiple voice prompts its way without having to say “Siri” or “Hey Siri” at the beginning of every follow-up request.
It’s puzzling that an AI assistant — one that lives on over a billion phones, tablets, and smartwatches — hasn’t cracked the code for flowing conversations. Siri is a lazy sitting duck in the AI race
Chopping off a “hey” or making Siri sound less robotic isn’t the kind of groundbreaking upgrade that Siri deserves. Certainly not in 2023, when AI chatbots fueled by Open AI’s GPT-4 or Google’s LaMDA natural language models are trying to reimagine everything from web searches and writing research papers to acting as virtual partners that soothe your anxiety or loneliness.
At this point in time, Siri has become almost a laughingstock in the voice assistant arena. What’s even more disappointing is the fact that Siri offers arguably the most impressive task automation suite if you know your way around Apple’s Shortcuts app. Alas, Apple won’t take the next logical step and bake Siri in at the heart of its own apps such as Notes or Safari.
Take, for example, Bing Chat. It started off standalone, then made its way to the Edge browser, and now lives in the Windows 11 search bar at the OS level. Of course, it’s also supercharging Office tools like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, among others. Likewise, Google Bard is appearing inside Workspace products like Gmail, Docs, and Slides. Siri, meanwhile, is nowhere to be seen across Apple’s own applications.
Yes, Apple doesn’t offer a productivity toolkit as fleshed-out and feature-heavy as Google’s or Microsoft’s. But it still has to start somewhere. The greenest pasture for that Siri revolution? The vaunted iMessage.
Despite Google spending millions on Rich Communication Services (RCS) and stirring an online wave that has many people begging Apple for RCS adoption, Apple is far too proud — and protective — of the “blue bubble” privilege to ever allow cross-platform messaging harmony.
It’s almost comical that on the same day as WWDC, Google announced that smart compose — a feature that stays ahead of you with smart suggestions as you type a message — is coming to Google Chat.
