This is Apple’s last best chance make Siri a viable chatbot
Siri is not the same simple, charming digital assistant Apple launched with the iPhone 4s in 2011. Though always AI-based, Siri 2024 is considerably smarter than it was back then, when I asked it simple questions («Where are the pumpkins?») and had it perform simple tasks, like scheduling a meeting.
It’s had more than a decade of brain transplants to make it a better interlocutor and digital companion, but Apple has never even tried to make Siri a true ChatBot, which was fine until the world changed early last year.
The time has long passed when Apple can steer clear of a category while it watches others trip and stumble. Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) is easily the most important technological innovation of this century, and while not everyone is pleased with how ChatGPT, Google Bard, and Windows CoPilot work, their penchant for hallucinations and plagiarism is doing little to slow down their steady progress. We’re never rolling back the clock and walking away from Generative AI.
Put simply, it’s time for Apple to act and the most obvious way to introduce its own form of Generative AI is through Siri, and only Siri.What’s in an AI name?
Microsoft was comfortable dropping «Bing Chat» in favor of CoPilot because Bing still has under 4% of the global search market. Nobody misses asking «Did you ask Bing Chat?». Nobody knows what Samsung’s Galaxy AI means for its Bixby digital assistant (a poor cousin to Siri) but I suspect no one would squawk if Samsung replaced the Bixby button with a Galaxy AI button on its upcoming, anticipated Samsung Galaxy S24 lineup.
