Apple’s Siri turns ten, still acts like a two-year-old
MacDailyNews Webmaster
Apple is great at many things. Personal assistants aren’t one of them, clearly, as Siri has been with us for a decade now, but still acts like a two-year-old.
On October 4, 2011, one day before the death of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, the company introduced Siri, a new personal assistant which debuted in iPhone 4S.
At the time, Apple claimed Siri to be “an intelligent assistant” that “understands context allowing you to speak naturally when you ask it questions.”
A decade later and that’s still a lie, proven by idiot Siri’s inability to execute simple commands / answer simple questions multiple times per day — for those who haven’t long ago given up on Apple’s longest-running failure (not counting Eddy Cue, because, seriously, have you ever seen Eddy run?).
(To the bar, maybe. But we kid.)
(Yes, of course, we’re talking about the salad bar.)
Eddy CueAnalysts were cool on the company’s prospects but praised Siri as a potential game-changer. One called it “a powerful harbinger of the future use of mobile devices,” while another said it was “the beginning of a new user experience [for] all of Apple’s mobile and Mac products.”
A decade later, the sheen has worn off Siri’s star. “It is such a letdown,” was how Schiller described the promise of voice interfaces past, and such a description could easily be applied to Apple’s contribution to the genre. Everyone who uses Siri has their own tales of frustration — times when they’ve been surprised not by the intelligence but the stupidity of Apple’s assistant, when it fails to carry out a simple command or mishears a clear instruction. And while voice interfaces have indeed become widespread, Apple, despite being first to market, no longer leads. Its “humble personal assistant” remains humble indeed: inferior to Google Assistant on mobile and outmaneuvered by Amazon’s Alexa in the home.
So, where did things go wrong? How did Apple lose its lead? The answer is complicated.
Many suggest Apple’s dedication to privacy means it can never keep up with rivals like Google whose business involves collecting users’ data because that data is incredibly useful when it comes to improving AI systems. I don’t buy this as a reason for Siri’s failure, though. First, because Apple’s love of user privacy is far from absolute.
Apple’s love of user privacy is far from absolute.
MacDailyNews Take: Supposedly, Siri uses advanced machine learning technologies to function, which isn’t saying much for Apple’s version of machine learning (which interestingly seems to work fine for photography and videography, but for Siri operates more like a blender full of wrenches set on puree).
A more convincing explanation is management dysfunction. In 2018, The Information published a damning report on the comings-and-goings at team Siri… [which] had devolved into “petty turf battles and heated arguments” between rival factions. They were exacerbated by a lack of leadership and continuity in the Apple execs overseeing Siri. As one former employee told The Information: “When Steve died the day after Siri launched, they lost the vision […] They didn’t have a big picture.”
MacDailyNews Take: On the plus side, if you wish Siri a “Happy Birthday” today, it’ll feed back some canned jokes.
