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Siri and Alexa are playing catch-up with chatbots
Siri and Alexa are playing catch-up with chatbots
Amazon is reportedly set to showcase its new and improved Alexa at a product event February 26. But the more capable voice assistant — which has been teased as “coming soon” for about a year now — likely won’t be available for at least another month. Meanwhile, Apple has been making Siri incrementally smarter as it slowly rolls out Apple Intelligence. A major upgrade was expected to come later this spring with iOS 18.4, but might also be delayed.
Amazon and Apple, once the innovators in virtual assistants, are now seen as playing catch-up to artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT.
When Apple unveiled Siri at an event back in 2011, the tech seemed revolutionary. Scott Forstall, Apple’s senior vice president of iOS software, gave a demonstration that included using voice to check the weather and set alarms.
Thirteen years later, Sean Saulsbury, a software entrepreneur in Oceanside, California, said that’s about all he uses Siri for: “Simple reminders on my phone. Just, ‘Remind me to do this or remind me to do that.'”
Siri has gotten updates over the years: You can now set two timers at once as of a 2023 update. But Saulsbury says the tool still struggles with basic requests.
“Like, I’ll get an email and I’ll tell it, like, ‘Hey, read me this email, the one that I have open, you know, read me this email,'” he said. “And it just reads me the the titles of the last five emails I’ve gotten.”
Alexa from Amazon, a Marketplace underwriter, can set timers well. But Grant Berry uses his eight Echo devices to control home electronics like his lights or alarm system.
“I’m able to say what to do exactly using very precise language,” he said.
Berry is a professor of language science at Villanova University who also worked on Alexa technology for Amazon. He said improvements in natural language processing, the way computers understand human language, have helped voice assistants like Alexa become more conversational over time. But they’re still more rigid than modern AI chatbots.
“Alexa can tell you jokes,” said Berry, “but they’re all really bad dad jokes. Ask her what her favorite color is.”
She’ll say, “I like Ultraviolet. It glows with everything,” every single time.
“And, you know someone hard coded that in, yeah, had to have,” said Berry.
Most people don’t need standup comedy from their voice assistants, but Berry notes using more sophisticated AI language models, like those powering ChatGPT, will make it easier to communicate with devices the way we do with people.
“It is natural for us to omit information or reference back to things that have been previously stated,” he said.
You might ask, “Hey Siri who is the president of France?” Then just use a pronoun instead of a proper name to follow up: “How long has he been president?”
Asking Siri that series of questions yields mixed results and often refers users to use ChatGPT, which tells me Emanuel Macron has been president of France for 7 years and 9 months.
OpenAI’s chatbot can carry on spoken conversations, as can Google Gemini, but today’s top AI systems are typically thought of as typing-based said Larry Heck, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and interactive computing at Georgia Tech who has worked on voice assistants for Microsoft, Google and Samsung.
“I really don’t think that we’ve used voice in the way that many of us have dreamed about,” said Heck.
He wants an AI conversation partner he could ask for help, say, brainstorming his trip to Italy.
“(Where) the AI says, ‘Oh you know you’re interested in staying in a medieval castle in Tuscany. Oh, you know I found a few places. These are kind of cool. What do you think about these?'” he said.
Heck noted that currently, even the most advanced AI systems can only engage in so much back and forth. They typically find an answer, or confidently make one up, instead of asking follow up questions.
That’s not great if you want a voice assistant you can trust to make purchases or appointments — potentially at a monthly fee as Amazon is reportedly planning.
But even if voice assistants do improve, users like Saulsbury might not bother.
“Right now it’s hard for me to think of what I would do, because I’ve been frustrated with it,” he said.
Maybe set yourself a reminder: “Hey Siri, remind me to try you out again once you get updated.”
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