It’s time to kill Siri

But it’s safe to say that even Apple and Amazon’s Alexa had cultural cachets that Google Assistant never enjoyed. It was not uncommon to hear Siri or Alexa’s names in movies and TV shows. They were much more recognizable than Google’s popular name voice assistants. This may be why Amazon has decided to keep Alexa branding and simply add a “+” icon to show something new Alexa Powered soup-up version The latest, large-scale language model and perhaps the reason why Apple is still dependent on Siri.

Photo: Julian Chokkat

This may all be fine if Apple actually releases a significantly improved Siri that will deliver on that promise and work when you say it originally. With a massive marketing push to put Apple Intelligence in everyone’s hearts (Probably a regretful move), which would have been a great opportunity to surprise users with a very improved Siri. A few months later, customers wonder why Siri (such as the new look) is behind.

But the broader problem affecting all large-scale language models is not just branding, but the user interface. Harrison compares it to the age of command-line computing and the shift towards graphical user interfaces (GUIs) in the 80s and 90s. It is not the graphics that made the latter more popular, but the discoverability and explorable interfaces. In the command line era, you had to remember how to do anything. The GUI allows anyone to place it in front of their computer and find ways to navigate the operating system.

If you place someone in front of a ChatGpt or Gemini and tell them to ask something, saying it’s an incredible tool, they’ll stare blankly at the flashing prompt. “It appears we’ve returned to interface design 30 years ago. They don’t know what to do or what to say,” Harrison says he did this exact experiment with his parents. They asked what the weather was tomorrow and the AI ​​replied that it had no information.

“We regressed with discoverability,” he says. “Normal people, not technology people, have to think about it in a fundamentally different way now, simply by setting a timer with SIRI for the past decade. That’s a very difficult problem. Some kind of name change of the application is important.”

Saying goodbye to Siri will be a big move for Apple. After all, it has been investing in it for over a decade. But most people today use it to play music, check the weather, set a timer, and not pushing the boundaries of current relatively limited capabilities. Even if the next generation of Siri’s feature packed with features arrives as promised, it’s hard to see it change anytime soon.

“For 99% of the planets, this kind of AI revolution is completely I crossed my headHarrison says. Like a decade of transition from the command line to a graphical user interface, it takes time and education to rethink how these personal voice assistants use, but the new name will help Apple in the transition.