It¡¯s pretty obvious to anyone that¡¯s used all three, that Siri is far behind other digital assistants like Google Assistant and Amazon¡¯s Alexa, especially when it comes to trying to understand what you want.
Though Apple has greatly improved Siri over the years with newer features and better voicing, it¡¯s slow start is much more prominent now, thanks to the launch of the new HomePod, Apple¡¯s first smart speaker. So how did Apple manage to lag so far behind despite its head start? Well, according to a new report from The Information, the company simply dropped the ball.
Shortly after Apple acquired the Siri app in 2010 for $200 million (no, it was never Apple¡¯s own innovation), the company quickly integrated it into the iPhone 4S in 2011. It held so much potential at the time, and Apple promised to bring the innovation of voice control to it, just like it had done with multi-touch in the original iPhone.
Unfortunately, Steve Jobs died in 2011, taking his visionary ideas with him. After that, instead of continuously updating Siri, Richard Williamson, iOS chief Scott Forstall's former deputy, instead ?pushed for it to be updated only annually, in time for new iOS releases. Of course, you want your digital assistant to get smarter faster than that if you want it to work. Google and Amazon both understood this fact, that digital assistants need constant tweaking to match user demand.
Williamson denies this however, instead blaming Siri¡¯s creators for the slowdown. ¡°It was slow, when it worked at all. The software was riddled with serious bugs. Those problems lie entirely with the original Siri team, certainly not me.¡±
But there were other problems over the years too. The Siri team had a habit of turning the assistant into a patchwork with pieces from other acquired properties, and that didn¡¯t always work. For example, they had problems integrating new search features from Topsy in 2013 and natural language features from VocalIQ in 2015. The Topsy team supposedly didn¡¯t want to work with the Siri team, calling them ¡°slow¡± and complaining they¡¯d constantly patched their rickety starting infrastructure instead of overhauling it as was advisable.
In fact, Apple¡¯s engineers wanted to do that, just trash it all and build from scratch. Unfortunately, that¡¯s not something easily done when several hundreds of millions of people are already using Siri across Apple devices.
Even worse, the report shows that Apple didn¡¯t even want to integrate Siri into the original design for the HomePod. At least, not until the Amazon Echo launched and it had Alexa with voice activation. And it didn¡¯t help that the Siri team members didn¡¯t even know about the HomePod project until 2015, even though the Echo unveiled in late 2014.
As it stands, it doesn¡¯t look like there may be a lot of hope for Siri. She¡¯s got even more users now, so blowing it all up and rebuilding from the ashes is a risky proposition, and certainly expensive. At the end of the day, it¡¯ll probably come down to how much Apple think it can get away with before smartphones become completely AI-focused and the iPhone is in danger of dropping right off the map.