When Siri was announced more than 10 years ago, it made a big splash with its revolutionary functions, followed by Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa. While all these smart assistants can help people turn lights on and off, create reminders or respond to easy tasks, they seem to have lost momentum in the face of the new wave of artificial intelligence led by OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
For Siri, “it has a cumbersome design that makes adding new features time-consuming,” says John Burkey, a former Apple engineer who worked on the virtual assistant.
Burkey was given the task of developing Siri in 2014. But since the database contains a huge list of words in about 2 dozen languages, his vast knowledge made it a “big snowball” because whenever someone wanted to add a word to Siri’s database, it “was a huge pile.”
Burkey notes that updates with new emoticons will require rebuilding the entire database, which could take up to 6 weeks. Adding more complex features such as new search tools can take almost a year.
In short, according to Burkey, unless it is completely rebuilt, Siri will not become a creative assistant like ChatGPT. This could mean alarm bells are ringing for Siri.
If we leave all this aside, a news published by Bloomberg recently seems interesting. The report said that many engineers, including members of the Siri team, are testing language-generating concepts every week. So it looks like Apple is working on making Siri a ChatGPT-like structure.
While it’s unclear whether Siri will be revamped, it’s interesting to know that Apple engineers are actively working on improving the virtual assistant with the goal of moving from simple questions to understanding context and adding a proper conversation.
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