It’s time to kill Siri

However, it is right to say that Apple and even Alexa from Amazon had a cultural cache that Google’s assistant has never appreciated. It was not unusual to hear the name of Siri or Alexa in a film or in a television program; They were much more recognizable than Google generic vowel assistant. This could be the reason why Amazon has decided to keep the Alexa brand and simply add a “+” icon to indicate the new make -up version of Alexa fueled by the latest large models, and perhaps because Apple is still hanging from Siri.

This may have been everything ok if Apple had actually kept his promise and released a much improved Siri when he originally said he would do it. With a massive marketing push to put Apple intelligence in everyone’s mind (Perhaps a ruined move), it would have been a great opportunity to amaze users with a much improved Siri. Months later, customers are left to ask themselves why Siri – the new appearance and everything else – is further back.

But the largest problem that affects all large language models is not only the brand, but the user interface. Harrison compares it with the days of calculating the command line and the transition to the graphic user interface (GUI) in the 80s and 90s. It was not the graphics that made the latter more popular, but the discovery and the explorable interface. In the era of the command line, you had to remember how to do anything. With Gui, you could put anyone in front of a computer and would be able to understand how to navigate the operating system.

If you put someone in front of Chatgpt or Gemini, say that it is an incredible tool and tell them to ask him anything, they will fix the promptmium without expression. “It is as if we had returned to 30 years in the design of the interface. They have no idea what to do or say.” Harrison says she had done this exact experiment with her parents: they asked what time was tomorrow and the IA replied that she did not have such information.

“We regressed in discovery,” he says. “A normal person, not technology, if everything they have done is to establish timers with Siri in the last 10 years, and now they must think about it in a fundamentally different way, this is an extremely difficult problem. A sort of renomination of the application will be important.”

To say goodbye to Siri would be a great move for Apple, after all, spent more than a decade to invest in it. But most people today still use it to play music, control time and set timer and does not even push the boundaries of its current, relatively limited skills. It is difficult to see that it changes soon, even if the next generation full of Siri functionality arrives as promised.

“For 99 percent of the planet, this type of AI revolution has totally went beyond their head“Says Harrison. Like the 10 -year transition from the command line to the graphic user interfaces, thinking about the way we use these personal vowels will take time and education, but perhaps a new name will help Apple with the transition.