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.
This story is part of our complete Apple WWDC coverage 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.
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.
Despite Google spending millions on Rich Communication Services 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. Maybe, Siri can analyze your Mail app and present you with a summarized version of your inbox. There’s an excellent app called Shortwave that does that for you. I absolutely love it. Maybe, just like the AI-powered Microsoft Teams, Siri could one day automatically transcribe your video calls and also present a concise version for you to quickly catch up in the Phone app.
One can argue that Google has stuffed too many features at the heart of Google Assistant — way more than a lot of users would ever derive any utility from. But at the same time, the feature disparity between Google Assistant and Siri is also absurdly lopsided. And I am not even touching on what Google’s Bard AI chatbot can pull off.
Google is so bullish that it reportedly dismantled the Google Assistant and took an all-hands-on-deck approach to improve Bard and other AI products. Say what you will, but AI advancements are finally happening, with consumer gadgets at the center of it all. We are still very much in the early days of this shift, but the products that have arrived so far have really made an impact in the day-to-day lives of millions.
Drawing from the conversational chops of GPT-4, Bing Chat can crawl the web for you and find answers. It can also tailor its responses based on how formal or casual you want it to sound. It has a celebrity mode that makes it talk like any famous personality you can imagine. It can even generate images based on a few words of text.
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