Profiling and Critiquing Siri, Apple’s AI
by Albert Leung and Xiang Liu
Profile
If you heard of Apple, you’ve probably heard of Siri as well. Siri is a virtual assistant that uses artificial intelligence technology. Some things Siri can do is make calls and send texts without the user having to manually touch the phone, and make a call when you’re driving or busy on the go. Siri can also access various applications on the phone such as playing music that you request, setting reminders, and many more.
Today, Siri is available on all Apple products that have a user interface or if it has a voice interaction feature. With every release, Siri is becoming smarter, better, and faster. Siri process requests with ease and accuracy, and it can understand what people command it to do with more precision. To get to this point, it took decades of work, research, and revisions to become this masterpiece.
To much surprise, Siri wasn’t created or developed by Apple. Siri was found out of SRI International, a non-profit research unit. This unit consisted of three men who eventually came to be the co-founders of Siri: Adam Cheyer, Dag Kittlaus, and Tom Gruber. The objective was to create a highly intelligent and “realistic” (virtual) assistant for smartphone consumers. By creating a virtual assistant that could talk, smartphone users can perform difficult or time-consuming tasks via voice, which would make these tasks easier and save time.
Back in the early 1990s, Cheyer had developed a tablet-like PC prototype that you could interface using verbal command and handwritten recognition. This eventually led to the creation of Siri, the automated voice assistant on Apple products. For over two decades, the three men worked to perfect their AI program as they made more than 50 versions of the Siri technology. With Apple releasing the iPhone, the three men saw an opportunity to use Siri and release it out to the public.
After spending the next few years creating a commercial version of Siri, the AI was finally released on the app store in February 2010. Just a few weeks after the release, Steve Jobs called Siri and told them that he wanted to buy the company. At first, the co-founders refused the offer, but when Jobs asked again a few months later, Siri was sold to Apple in April 2010 for more than $200 million.
When Siri was first released in 2011 debuting with the iPhone 4s, it was a new concept and it was cool for a user to be able to talk to their phone. Although it wasn’t the first digital assistant ever created, many people were not exposed to interactive AI. With the AI being built into the iPhone, it soon became a popular feature that is useful in many scenarios when someone cannot pick up a phone at the same time.
Siri was a success to both Apple and the technology world. To start, Apple managed to sell a lot of phones and tablets with the release of Siri being added. Siri can collect data every time it is used. This is beneficial to Apple because they can learn about users such as how they speak, what questions they ask, their interests, and more. This type of data is hard to obtain and Apple was one of the first companies that were able to capitalize on this type of data. With all the data being collected, Siri can continue to improve and become a better AI.
The release of Siri drove intense interest in the voice assistant field that many other companies have followed and capitalized on due to the success of the release. Some of these companies are Samsung, Amazon, and Google in which they all integrated their voice assistants AI into their smartphones and devices.
Although there are many voice assistants nowadays, Siri started it all. It is a household name and made voice assistants a necessary feature in smart devices. At the end of the day, Siri is being used by consumers every day, showing that voice assistants have an impact on people’s lives.
Critique
As most people know nowadays, Apple has been innovative in creating new devices that go farther and farther into people’s interests and what the future can potentially hold for technology. Since the creation of Siri, we have seen more and more assistive AI in other areas of technology as well, such as with the Google Assistant in Google devices, or Alexa created under Amazon. We may not credit Siri as being the first virtual assistant to be created, but we can recognize that Siri has been revolutionary in starting the wave of the artificially intelligent assistant. The Siri we know today as well as other virtual assistants are completely different from what we had back in 1970 or even back in 2010 when Apple first introduced Siri.
Nowadays we can see the influence Siri has had on AI. With the creation of Siri, many other companies have taken advantage of the AI and have created their own versions. As mentioned previously, we see many different virtual assistants in our world today such as Google Assistant, Alexa, and Cortana created by Google, Amazon, and Microsoft respectively. Each assistant has their own little added touch. For example, Google Assistant and Cortana are all available across multiple platforms while Alexa and Siri are only available with their respective devices. We can also see similarities between all devices, such as speech recognition and their ease of use. Ultimately, many users are still using Siri nowadays as their main virtual assistant, but we see many other virtual assistants working with the same functionalities as Siri, and with devices that may also be cheaper than those sold by Apple! Many of these companies have picked up on AI technology and have made them more accessible and more affordable.
To be honest much has changed in the field of AI assistants since Siri first appeared. In the beginning, Siri could only recognize simple commands and voice lines and also only had one voice being used. Nowadays, Siri has been able to recommend different items related to what a user said as well as use many other voices. Not only Siri, but other virtual assistants have much of the same functionalities. The biggest difference with all the virtual assistants existing nowadays is the processing power and the speed at which the AI picks up on what a user said. As tested by Business News Daily, they saw that Google Assistant and Siri were the best in recognizing speech, especially in different noise environments. I would say that compared to old technology like IBM’s Shoebox or when Siri was first being tested, major changes and improvements have been made on virtual assistants and how they function.
Siri is remarkable in terms of how impactful it has been within the last decade. Since the launch of Siri in the iPhone 4 back in 2011, we can see the influence this technology has had on many major companies such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. With their creation, we can expect to see more and more improvements being made to their systems, and eventually, we could be expecting newer technology to be released, just like how we were in 2011 when Siri entered our world as the first virtual assistant.
References
https://www.bigspeak.com/cheyer-kittlaus-siri-viv/
https://medium.com/swlh/the-story-behind-siri-fbeb109938b0
