“Norman Winarsky was among those present at the birth of Siri… (Winarsky headed SRI’s entrepreneurial arm at the time of Siri’s development and acquisition, and was a co-founder and board member of the original Siri company),” Corinne Purtill reports for Forbes. “In 2011, on the eve of Siri’s much-anticipated introduction on the iPhone 4S, Winarsky said he had no idea what Apple was planning to do with the technology he helped create. He did, however, ‘believe that Apple will use Siri to start another revolution.'”
“The revolution ended up a little clunkier than planned,” Purtill reports. “Seven years after that launch, Siri still at times stumbles over spoken requests and struggles to integrate the many things it should know about you into useful responses. It remains the most popular AI assistant, but usage is declining. This isn’t where Winarsky thought Siri would be at this point. ”
“Winarsky acknowledges that some of this disappointment stems from the sheer difficulty of predicting the pace of major technological advancement,” Purtill reports. “But part of it is also likely because Apple chose to take Siri in a very different direction than the one its founders envisioned. Pre-Apple, Winarsky said, Siri was intended to launch specifically as a travel and entertainment concierge… Apple launched Siri as an assistant that can help you in all areas of your life, a bigger challenge that will inevitably take longer to perfect, Winarsky said.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Siri is worse than she should be today due to internal issues at Apple (Siri used to be under Eddy Cue, she’s now recently become the responsibility of Craig Federighi), but is better than the general public sentiment allows.
Apple released Siri, the first modern digital virtual assistant, in October 2011. Amazon released Alexa in November 2014. Google Assistant was released in May 2016… Why is Siri not regarded as far and away the best, but rather as notably worse than those later entrants?
Mismanagement of the project from the software to the marketing. — MacDailyNews, February 8, 2018
SEE ALSO:
Siri on HomePod can actually do quite a lot – February 9, 2018
What Apple needs to do to improve Siri – February 8, 2018
Is Apple really falling behind in the artificial intelligence race? – September 5, 2017
