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Twelve years after its release, Siri feels like a modern-day Apple Newton. They both started life as bold new personal assistants, but ended up stagnating and falling by the wayside. And both have been the butt of jokes on major sitcoms, with Newton famously being skewered. simpsons, Meanwhile, Siri just recently “starred” in the latest season of the movie. curb your enthusiasm (Warning: The scene in question contains abusive language).
But while Newton was canceled out of misery in 1998, Apple kept Siri running on our iPhones. Well, just barely – anyone who has used Siri has at some point expressed frustration at its seeming loss of IQ. Apple can’t continue like this. And fortunately, there’s growing evidence that Siri will finally get a reboot (or at least a makeover) at WWDC 2024.
Apple has strongly hinted that AI, and to a lesser extent Siri, will be at the forefront of its annual developer conference.Greg Joswiak, Senior Vice President of Marketing Posted on X (old Twitter) The event is “Absolutely Incredible,” casually spelled out in capital letters as AI. Additionally, the promotional typography (below) also reflects Siri’s color scheme.
But a wave of credible rumors and Apple’s own machine learning research also support the theory that Siri may soon become, if not great, then at least a less anachronistic bafflement. Masu.
How will Apple reboot Siri in June? It’s a long road home. Every time I speak to ChatGPT’s built-in voice features, I’m amazed at how natural it feels in comparison. The problem is that ChatGPT doesn’t have direct access to iOS to control your phone (unless you use shortcuts). And Apple doesn’t seem to have the generative AI talent or the appetite to sacrifice privacy to do proper cloud-based AI.
This solution could be a compromise that combines Apple’s latest on-device machine learning with third-party AI models such as Google Gemini. The result could be a complete reinvention of Siri, but if it saves the voice assistant from its current malaise, that’s good enough for me…
private chat
It’s unclear whether Siri will be relaunched at WWDC 2024, and the latest rumors are a bit confusing. This week, Bloomberg’s Mark Garman claimed that Apple has “no plans to debut its own generative AI chatbot” at WWDC 2024.
But that doesn’t mean Apple isn’t planning to upgrade Siri. Apple never recognized Siri as a chatbot like his ChatGPT. Starting in June 2021, your voice assistant will handle your questions on your device by default. “This solves one of the biggest privacy concerns for voice assistants: unnecessary voice recording,” Apple said in a press release at the time.
Apple almost certainly hasn’t changed its mind since then. Therefore, any on-device performance improvements for Siri will have to come from Apple. And there’s evidence that the tech giant is thinking about this.
Mark your calendars for #WWDC24, June 10-14. It’s going to be absolutely incredible! pic.twitter.com/YIln5972ZDMarch 26, 2024
Last week, Apple researchers revealed that the voice assistant doesn’t use trigger words like “Siri” and instead uses on-device AI to tell whether you’re talking to your phone or someone else. They published a paper in March 2024 that tested whether it is possible to tell when someone is speaking. This comes after Apple quietly unveiled a family of multimodal models (AI models that can interpret different types of data simultaneously) called MM1.
In the voice assistant paper, Apple researchers trained a large-scale language model (LLM) based in part on OpenAI’s GPT-2 to generate voice patterns that indicate whether we are asking our phone for help. I looked for it. It’s quite futuristic. Although the results were promising, it seems premature for this type of technology to make its way to iOS 18 and the iPhone.
Still, it’s clear that Apple is working hard on voice assistant technology, and we’ll likely see some of the results at WWDC 2024. Just six months ago, Apple was rapidly increasing its spending on conversational AI to “millions of dollars a day.” According to a report in The Information. Given the rapid progress of rivals, some of this investment will certainly go towards improving Siri.
New Siri announcements haven’t completely disappeared in recent months either. In December 2023, Apple announced that its new S9 SiP (System in Package) allows Apple Watch Series 9 and Watch Ultra 2 to “now handle Siri requests on-device.” This means you can ask Siri questions about over 20 health data markers because no data leaves your smartwatch.
None of this is the work of companies that have abandoned voice assistants. The question is what will Apple do about the larger piece of the puzzle: answering queries that Siri on the device can’t answer…
I feel like I don’t understand it well…
If Siri can’t answer your question, you can ask Siri to search the web. This is where Apple might consider outsourcing to external AI models to help with more difficult queries. Bloomberg predicts this could be Google Gemini in the US and Europe, and Wall Street says Apple is also in talks with China’s Baidu. journal.
The “heavy lifting” of this generative AI could include functions such as “creating images or writing essays based on simple prompts,” according to the Bloomberg report. However, these AI capabilities will be delivered via the cloud, and Apple will continue to use its own AI models to handle on-device features and Siri actions.
It’s not new for Apple that this Google Gemini deal is under discussion. The tech giant doesn’t have its own search engine, so it has long had an agreement (reportedly worth $18 billion a year) with Google to be the default option in Safari. The agreement is currently under threat from EU regulators.
Bloomberg notes that a similar deal for Google’s Gemini AI model could only build on Apple and Google’s existing partnership, again if regulators allow it. If it doesn’t crumble under the pressure of regulatory scrutiny, it could even become a convenient alternative to the current arrangement between the tech giants.
Regardless of what happens in these talks, Apple won’t be able to solve the entire generative AI puzzle on its own, and it doesn’t seem likely to change its stance on privacy. That will likely mean some compromise rather than a huge leap forward for an upgraded Siri.
baby steps
Importantly, I’m not calling for (or expecting) a complete reboot of Siri at WWDC 2024. All I want is for Apple to acknowledge Siri’s existence, make it less vulnerable, and figure out how to make Siri more useful. Conversational iPhone assistant. For now, Siri is a brake on the potential of products like AirPods and Apple Vision Pro, but iOS 18 could start to turn things around.
Siri’s development has been hampered for years by internal squabbles, a lack of technological progress, and the broader problem that voice assistants don’t generate much revenue. But if Apple outsources some of its generative AI capabilities to someone like Gemini AI, as rumors suggest, it could try to bounce back while reducing liability when the occasional inevitable controversy arises. You can do it.
None of this will catapult Siri towards becoming the voice assistant leader. But it could be enough to keep Apple in the AI game while bringing back one of the iPhone’s most frustrating features. At the moment, Siri is damaging Apple’s reputation, so WWDC 2024 is bound to be a turning point in any case.
Tim Cook has already promised in Apple’s annual earnings call that the company will “break new ground” with generative AI this year. It’s not necessarily about Siri, but could Apple leave Siri alone and do all this? I don’t think so. Cook said the technology “brings transformational opportunities to users,” and I hope it makes Siri more than just a cooking timer.
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