Siri is not the same simple, charming digital assistant that Apple launched with the iPhone 4s in 2011. Although it has always relied on artificial intelligence, the Siri of 2024 is much smarter than it was then, when you asked it simple questions (“Where's the pumpkin?” “). ) and have it perform simple tasks, such as scheduling a meeting.
It's undergone more than a decade of brain implants to make it a better digital communicator and companion, but Apple never tried to make Siri a true ChatBot, which was fine until the world changed early last year.
It's long past time when Apple could stay away from one category while watching others falter. Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the most important technological innovations of this century, and while not everyone is happy with how ChatGPT, Google Bard, and Windows CoPilot work, their penchant for hallucinations and plagiarism does little to slow their steady progress. We are never turning back the clock and moving away from generative AI.
Simply put, it's time for Apple to act, and the most obvious way to deliver its own form of generative AI is through Siri, and only Siri.
What's in the name of artificial intelligence?
Microsoft was comfortable ditching “Bing Chat” in favor of CoPilot because Bing still had less than 4% of the global search market. No one misses to ask “Did you ask Bing Chat?”. No one knows what Samsung's Galaxy AI means for its digital assistant Bixby (a poor cousin to Siri) but I suspect no one would scream if Samsung replaced the Bixby button with a Galaxy AI button in the upcoming and expected Samsung Galaxy S24 lineup.
However, for Apple, I contend there is too much brand equity to get rid of the Siri name. It's a good name (something the late Steve Jobs, who died a day after its launch, certainly had a hand in defining) and the iconography is solid and smart-looking. Have you pressed the iPhone Siri button recently? The animations on iOS 17 are very futuristic and perfect for what I assume is an upcoming generative AI brain implant.
My belief has been strengthened by recent news indicating this Apple's generative AI works well in its Ajax language model This could mean that Siri handles conversation and personalization much better than the current version.
However, this “leak” offers scant details and doesn't confirm my hope that Apple will do the hard thing and make the generative AI leap that will move Siri into a dynamic space filled with ChatGPT, Bard, and LLMs like Google's Gemini and Meta's Llama 2. .
Apple has power
The truth is that if Apple implemented a really powerful LLM software on Siri (powered by a more powerful A18 Pro CPU that would handle the machine learning on board and fit the ample symbolic data stores inside) and allow it to connect to all parts of Apple's larger Apple ecosystem, Siri would Able to do things that most chatbots can only dream of.
It could, for example, finally fix the mess that is the Apple Home Kit and understand the control and setup of every connected smart device in an Apple-based smart home. Better yet, a lot of work can be done using just your voice.
And who knows what's possible when you have an amazingly intelligent Siri inside your best iPhone? It will help you optimize your phone and use it in ways you never thought possible. There is a clear top-down benefit to AI-based Siri.
By the way, none of this would break Apple's strict privacy promise if all Siri communications were wrapped in end-to-end encryption. This way, we can talk to Siri on the Apple Car and have it handle a variety of tasks in our home before we get there. We don't have to worry about someone sneaking into the communications stream and knowing the details of our smart homes or our lives.
Realizing its potential
With this ultimate brain transplant, Siri will become the speaker we've always dreamed of. To this day, most of my “conversations” with Siri end in a couple of sentences, preferably taking me to a web page result rather than engaging in the back-and-forth conversations necessary to figure out what I want.
Apple's opportunity here is huge and yet I worry that there is still a fear that large-scale generative AI based on data-hungry MBAs could be too dangerous and could open it up to criticism around privacy or even its machine learning models. People will want to know how Apple trained Ajax and Siri and where the data came from. Is this based on all the activity of billions of iPhones (anonymous, of course), or did Apple draw the training data from a literal well?
I suggest Apple ignore these concerns and be brave in whatever comes next. It's time for Apple to get into the AI race. Do it at WWDC 2024 and set the world on fire. We are ready for that.
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