A highly critical article in The Verge, “Hey Siri, what happened?”, discusses an issue many of us have been observing for some time: that Apple’s home assistant is noticeably less intelligent and more limited than its competitors such as Alexa or Google Assistant. The usage test confirms it: ten years after Siri’s introduction, if you have, as I do, both Alexa and Google Assistant at home and Siri always in your pocket, you tend to turn to Alexa for automation issues, timers and reminders, and to Google to ask all sorts of questions, leaving Siri only for relatively isolated and specific uses. If you are in an emergency situation, don’t even try…
So what happened? The explanation once given by those who know something about machine learning no longer seems to be the case: Apple is highly respectful of its users’ privacy and so would have more problems than other companies when it comes to collecting and using data to train its algorithms. However, the indications are that Apple is not so enormously respectful, given that it has been caught sending conversations with its assistant to external subcontractors who expressed astonishment at how sensitive some of the information contained in them was, and because it could, without too much trouble, pay third parties to generate those dialogues.
