However, it’s fair to say that Apple and even Amazon’s Alexa have had a cultural cachet that Google Assistant never enjoyed. It wasn’t unusual to hear Siri or Alexa’s name in a movie or TV show; they were much more recognizable than Google’s generic-named voice assistant. This may be why Amazon decided to keep the Alexa branding and simply add a “+” icon to denote the new souped-up version of Alexa powered by the latest large language models—and perhaps why Apple is still hanging onto Siri.
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Photograph: Julian Chokkattu
This might have all been OK if Apple actually delivered on its promise and released a functioning, much-improved Siri when it originally said it would. With a massive marketing push to put Apple Intelligence in everyone’s mind (maybe a regretful move), it would have been a great opportunity to wow users with a much-improved Siri. Months later, customers are left wondering why Siri—new look and all—still lags behind.
But the broader problem affecting all large language models isn’t just the branding, but the user interface. Harrison compares it to the days of command-line computing and the shift to the graphical user interface (GUI) in the ‘80s and ’90s. It wasn’t the graphics that made the latter more popular, but the discoverability and explorable interface. In the command-line era, you had to remember how to do anything. With GUI, you could put anyone in front of a computer, and they’d be able to figure out how to navigate the operating system.
If you put someone in front of ChatGPT or Gemini, say it’s an incredible tool, and tell them to ask it anything, they’ll just stare blankly at the blinking prompt. “It’s like we’ve gone back 30 years in interface design. They have no idea what to do or say.” Harrison says he did this exact experiment with his parents: They asked what the weather was tomorrow, and the AI responded that it didn’t have that information.
“We’ve regressed in discoverability,” he says. “A regular person, not the tech people, if all they’ve been doing is setting timers with Siri for the past 10 years, and now they have to think about it in a fundamentally different way—that’s an extremely hard problem. Some sort of renaming of the application is going to be important.”
Saying goodbye to Siri would be a big move for Apple—after all, it has spent more that a decade investing in it. But most people today still use it for playing music, checking weather, and setting timers, and aren’t even pushing the boundaries of its current, relatively limited, capabilities. It’s hard to see that changing anytime soon, even if Siri’s feature-packed next generation arrives as promised.
“For 99 percent of the planet, this kind of AI revolution has totally gone over their head,” Harrison says. Like the 10-year transition from command line to graphical user interfaces, rethinking the way we use these personal voice assistants will take time and education, but maybe a new name will help Apple with the transition.