It’s time to kill Siri

But, it is fair to say that Apple and even Amazon’s Alexa have cultural dishes that Google Assistant has never liked. It is not uncommon to hear Siri or Alexa’s name in a movie or TV show. They are easier to recognize than Google’s universal voice assistant. That’s probably why Amazon decided to keep the Alexa brand and add just a “+” icon to represent the new Alexa version of the Alexa version powered by the latest big language model, perhaps why Apple is still on Siri.

If Apple actually fulfilled its promise and released what it originally said, it would all be OK. With a huge marketing push to put Apple intelligence in everyone’s mind (perhaps a regretful move), it would be a great opportunity to make users marvel at the massively improved Siri. A few months later, customers wonder why Siri (new look and everyone) lags behind.

But the broader problem affecting all large language models is not only the brand, but the user interface. Harrison compared it to the days of command line computing and the transfer of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) from the 1980s and 1990s. It is not a graphics that makes the latter more popular, but a discoverability and explorable interface. In the command line age, you have to remember how to do anything. With the GUI, you can put anyone in front of your computer and they can figure out how to browse the operating system.

If you put someone in front of Chatgpt or Gemini, say it’s an incredible tool and tell them to ask anything and they’ll stare blankly at the tips of blinking. “It’s like we’ve been back to 30 years of interface design. They don’t know what to do or say.” Harrison said he conducted the exact experiment with his parents: they asked what the weather is tomorrow, and the AI ​​replied that there was no such information.

“We’ve come back to discoverability,” he said. “A normal person, not tech, if what they’ve been doing is, set timers with Siri for the past decade, now they have to think about that in a fundamentally different way – that’s an extremely tricky issue. Renaming an app will be important.”

Saying goodbye to Siri would be a huge move for Apple – after all, it took a decade of investment. However, most people today still use it for playing music, checking the weather and setting the timer, without even pushing the boundaries of its current (relatively limited) features. Even if Siri’s features are full of promises from the next generation, it’s hard to see a change anytime soon.

“For 99% of the planet, this AI revolution has completely disappeared,” Harrison said. Just like the 10-year transition from command lines to graphical user interfaces, rethinking the way we use these personal voice assistants will take time and education, but maybe the new name can help Apple make the transition.