Why Siri Needs To Get Smarter Faster

Siri is the most obvious place for more noticeable AI at Apple, and the company is actively pursuing the enhancement of Siri with ever-more advanced AI, according to an Apple spokesperson. Siri is already AI-based. Two years ago, Apple flipped a switch and Siri gained a range of advanced machine learning techniques. Apple has claimed that the AI has dramatically improved Siri’s speech recognition and the accuracy of results. Users don’t seem to have noticed. Complaints about Siri are still rife. Veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg wrote a scathing takedown of Siri this month for Recode and The Verge headlined, “Why does Siri seem so dumb?” Mossberg wrote that “in its current incarnation, Siri is too limited and unreliable to be an effective weapon for Apple in the coming AI wars.” Today’s Siri fits solidly within the pantheon of first-generation virtual assistants that includes Google Now, Microsoft’s Cortana, Amazon’s Alexa, and others, at least from the user perspective. These services create the illusion that the assistant can understand what users say, then return an audible voice response in colloquial speech. They all do a pretty good job under specific circumstances and for specific queries. But they lack more advanced AI, and cannot “figure things out” as well as many users would like them to do. Read more at Fast Company.