Sick of Siri: Why Apple Must Improve or Delete Siri

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I spoke about how much I love my AirPods in my review, but one feature killed their potential: Siri. I had the power to ask my phone of anything without looking at it, it should have been incredible. Instead, I just use it to turn my lights off or on, ask when my first meeting is, and ask about the weather. Siri’s capability set makes it feel like a simple terminal. Input this exact command, get a result. Often, due to poor language processing, Siri doesn’t even get what you say correct, and even when it does, it can’t do what you want it to do.

Compared to other digital assistants, Siri is a joke. I have both an Amazon Echo and a Google Home Mini in my small apartment. Both are far more capable than Siri out of the box. I can ask Google how to make a drink, or a particular dish, and it’ll walk me through, step by step, knowing that each request I make is related to the conversation we’ve been having. Siri will just display search results on your screen. You know, your screen, the thing you specifically were trying not to use.

Siri has become so far behind Alexa and Google Assistant that Apple has to make a difficult choice: either dedicate an unprecedented amount of time and effort into improving Siri, or open iOS up to third party assistants.

 

How Siri Could Improve Natural Language Processing

I’m going to get a little geeky here, but I’ll keep it simple. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple all approach machine learning and natural language processing in different ways. Google has been a data miner for years, collecting information on users to sell to advertisers. As a result, they know a lot about human interactions with technology, and know what users will ask for and how to respond to those requests. Google pushes machine learning tools like TensorFlow, which help developers offload machine learning tasks off device. Google’s less concerned about your privacy than raw performance. They found the best way to collect and process information, the core of machine learning, and they’re going to use it.

Basically: Google = stores your data, Apple = respects privacy.

Apple, on the other hand, is the opposite. Apple wants your data to remain private. They don’t collect information from your searches, your calendars, and they don’t read through your emails (yes, Google actually does that). Apple also tried to do as much machine learning on device as possible, and anonymizes any data leaving your device, so you can’t be tracked. This makes data collection and personalization far more difficult for Apple. It’s not shocking that Apple’s dedication to privacy would make its assistant the worst in the business. However, Amazon and Microsoft don’t have access to the data trove that Google’s sitting on, yet both manage to make far better products than Siri in the form of Alexa and Cortana.

Think Different

Apple has to think different about data mining, something they claim to be good at. If Apple wants to respect user’s privacy, they still have a wealth of methods to get information from users, and even keep processing on device.

The iOS keyboard can change depending on what you type. It can learn words you use frequently, even learn how you write. This should be expanded to improve Siri’s ability to understand what you’re requesting. By keeping all the data processing on device, Apple can read far more data without invading your privacy. They can look at the language you use in apps like Notes, Pages, and even the messages you send in Mail or iMessages. That might seem invasive, but since the data processing is just for language processing, and since it’s on device, users won’t have to worry about privacy concerns. Apple could, for example, look at the writing style I use to write this blog (as I’m doing it on an iPad), and improve my language learning model. That model could be encrypted and synced with all my Apple devices, improving Siri.

Apple could use a lot more information as well. They have access to a wealth of books through the Apple Book Store, they could do web crawling, they could go through music lyrics, movie scripts, and more to learn how to better understand human language. If they’re willing to sacrifice some privacy, they could even weight books, movies, and music I like more for language, so get a slightly better idea of how I’m likely to write or speak. Basically put, just because Apple’s unwilling to stoop down to Google’s level doesn’t mean they don’t have all the tools necessary to make Siri a powerful natural language processor. However, it seems they’ve instead focused their AI efforts on sorting my photos, something far less useful.

Has Apple Given up on Siri?

Apple’s AI advancements have been very small, focused more on looking at location, content in photos, and facial recognition to help me sort my photos, something I rarely do anyway. For the most part, I’ve just been able to create albums and manually sort my photos, and have never had a problem with it. Now, if Apple could help me clear out all my Leaf and Core related photos from my camera roll, that would be useful! But it can’t.

Apple also focused on the camera (pun intended, of course), improving its ability to detect scenes, apply new flash techniques, or add long exposure features to Live Photos. All of these are great, but largely under the hood. People don’t notice when Apple’s improving these features. That’s because they help us produce better products, but don’t help us interact with our devices. That’s what Siri is for, and it seems Apple hasn’t improved Siri at all in the past few years.

Stringing Siri Along

Apple seemingly has given up on Siri, but not quite enough. If Apple had truly given up on Siri, they’d allow you to replace the defunct digital assistant with a third party solution, like Google Assistant or Alexa. Android manufacturers have done this. I could use Google Assistant or Alexa on my HTC U11. Apple could give these third party developers deeper access to the data on devices, as long as they don’t collect that data, thus freeing up the platform for users. Clearly, this isn’t something Apple’s willing to do.

Apple isn’t dramatically improving Siri, but they’re also not allowing us any other choice. If nothing changes about Apple’s strategy, they should replace Siri. If not with a third party, at least with a new assistant that offers a huge improvement over Siri. By now, people associate the name Siri with something that fails or disappoints them, and, from a marketing perspective, that’s a poor brand to try to revitalize. Siri may truly be a lost cause.

The Competition

I have a morning ritual. My alarm goes off and I roll around in bed for half an hour trying to deny the fact that I have to wake up. I then groan, roll out of bed, cursed the damned world for not allowing me to start my day at 12PM, and make coffee. I use a French press, so I microwave a cup of water for 2 minutes, grind up some fresh coffee, pour it into my press, and then add the water. Now I’ve got to let it wait for a time between 3 and 7 minutes, depending on how strong I’m making it. If I’m more alert and feeling fun, I might let it go for 10 minutes or more, add some ice, and have an iced coffee. Why am I telling you this? Because Siri is not the assistant I use for help in this endeavor.

As soon as I pour the hot water over the coffee, I call out to my current favorite digital assistant: my Google Home Mini. “Hey, Google, can you set a timer for X minutes?” I then go read through Google News on my phone. Before Google IO, where Google gave everyone a Google Home Mini, I used Alexa for this task, and Amazon’s assistant was almost as good at it (I’ve found the Google Home Mini makes fewer mistakes).

Despite the fact that my iPhone and iPad are normally nearby during this process, I never use Siri. Alexa would occasionally mishear me and set an inaccurate timer, but Siri doesn’t always activate, and often gets the time wrong. Now, to be fair, we’re talking about the difference between devices made for recognizing voice and my iPhone, which may not be tuned to it as well. However, ask yourself, if Apple released a $30 Siri smart speaker, would you really prefer it over Google Assistant or Alexa? Having used all three, I know I wouldn’t.

What Should Apple Do?

The way I see it, Apple has two options: dedicate an overwhelming amount of time and effort into Siri, or abandon Siri. If they abandon Siri, they’ll need to open iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS up to third party developers, and ship these devices with Google Assistant or Alexa installed. As much as the second option would provide instant gratification, an instantly better product, I prefer the first option. Apple can allow Siri to do things they wouldn’t allow Amazon or Google to do, like access messages or change settings in the phone. Therefore, while the phone would become better at everything else, it wouldn’t be as good at being a voice controlled phone, tablet, watch, or TV, specifically.

So what should Apple do? They need to sit down and dedicate all their time on Siri right now. The smartphone won’t be the digital center of our lives for many more years. With the push into augmented reality (AR), wearable tech, and always available devices, voice control and artificial intelligence (AI) will be the future. If Apple doesn’t correct their path now, they’ll be as irrelevant as Blackberry in this future world shaped by Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.