It's Time to Kill Siri

WIRED

2 days ago

After almost 10 years, Google Assistant was recently axed in favor of Gemini. Siri gets a bad rap—now is the time for Apple to make a change too.
If you've had a passing interest in Apple over the past year, you've likely heard of the company's struggles in the AI race. Apple Intelligence, which arrived slightly late after the launch of the iPhone 16, fell short of expectations, and Apple has yet to deliver the much-improved Siri it promised at WWDC 2024. Siri got a new look and an integration with ChatGPT, but its ability to understand your personal context via emails, messages, notes, and calendar was 'indefinitely' delayed earlier this year as Apple is reportedly facing several challenges.
Even if Apple delivered a better Siri, would people use it? Despite arriving first, Siri has long been derided by iPhone owners, often the butt of a joke, as Google Assistant and Alexa rose to the top. But if Apple wants its customers to take the supposed improvements coming to the voice assistant seriously, it should consider taking a page from Google and killing it off for something new.
Google has no problem with pulling the plug when things aren't working, or priorities change. In fact, the search giant has a history of killing so many of its services that there's a website dedicated to tracking all the gravestones. One of its most recent terminations? Google Assistant. Photograph: Julian Chokkattu
Nearly 10 years since its debut, Google Assistant is in the process of being phased out from every ecosystem it was a part of. Wear OS smartwatches? It's being replaced soon. Android Auto? In the coming months. It's already no longer the default assistant on Android phones. By 2026, it's unlikely we'll see the branding anywhere anymore. So ends the reign of arguably the most effective voice assistant of its time, gone without a care in the world.
But Google's decision to kill it, instead of keeping the Google Assistant name, may have been smart. 'It's primarily branding,' says Chris Harrison, who directs the Future Interfaces Group at Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. 'But it underlines a technology reason, which is that the previous generation of these assistants really weren't very much like assistants. Asking for the weather and setting a timer—not very sophisticated. You wouldn't really ask a personal assistant for those mundane tasks.'
Gemini is completely different. It can rummage through your emails to find the location of your kid's soccer match, parse through large documents, and when paired with a camera-enabled device, can understand what you're seeing and offer help. Its capabilities are vastly superior to what Google Assistant could do. Apple's goal is to achieve similar results in a more privacy-friendly way—so that when you have Siri connect to ChatGPT, your data is not passed off to OpenAI.
'Apple thought Siri's capabilities would grow, but that didn't really materialize; Siri kind of atrophied out of the gate," Harrison says. 'Now, we're in this new generation of things that are really much more like assistants—they can do reasoning, personalization.' But while Google Assistant and Gemini both have voice interfaces, and at a first glance, they may share a similar look, they're two different applications. 'Simply renaming it Google Assistant 2.0 would not spur people to use it in a fundamentally different way.' It seems that switch to Gemini has been key to moving customer understanding along.
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. 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.