How Did Siri, Google, And Alexa Lose The AI Race?

The virtual assistants had more than a decade to become indispensable, but they were not fond of the clunky design and miscalculations which left some room for the Chat Bots to take advantage of the situation.  

On a Tuesday in San Francisco, Apple took the stage in a crowded auditorium to unveil the Fifth generation iPhone it looked identical to the previous version while having a new feature that the audience was soon buzzing about, this was Siri, the Virtual Assistant of Apple. 

Scott Forstall, Apple’s head of software, pushed an iPhone button to summon Siri and prodded it with questions. At his request, Siri checked and prodded it with questions, at his request, Siri checked the time in Paris at that moment and replied with the correct answer, “I’ve been in the A.I. field for a long time, and this still blows me away,” Mr. Forstall said.

This whole situation happened twelve years ago, and people have been surprised by a lot as a lot has happened since then and these Virtual Assistants have become even more reliable than before. The Tech world is now into another kind of Virtual Assistant, they go by the name of “Chat Bots”, and they are taking the world of technology by storm.

These AI-powered bots such as Chat GPT and the new ChatGPT plus from San Francisco company Open AI. People have used ChatGPT to handle some advanced tasks like coding, drafting business proposals, writing articles, and asking questions related to the user’s interests and chatGPT is yet to disappoint in any of the tasks given to it, some people have even used this service to write fiction.

 Saying this, ChatGPT uses AI to learn and is rapidly improving. Moreover, the excitement around these Chatbots shows how Siri, Alexa, and other voice assistants have found and achieved their lead in the race.

There’s no doubt that the arrival of these Virtual Assistants once illustrated the same response from people, but with the sudden improvement in technology due to a new form of Virtual Assistants, the people who are loving it are all for this improvement.  

“Over the past decade, the products hit roadblocks. Siri ran into technological hurdles, including clunky code that took weeks to update with basic features”, said John Burkey, who is a former Apple Engineer who worked on the assistant.

“Amazon and Google miscalculated how the voice assistants would be used which lead them to invest in areas with the technology that rarely paid off”, former employees said. “When those experiments failed, enthusiasm for the technology waned at the companies”, they said.  

Moreover, Voice Assistants are “dumb as a rock”, Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive explained in an interview this month with The Financial Times, also while declaring that newer AI would lead the way from this point onwards. Microsoft has worked closely with OpenAI by investing $13 billion in the Start-up and incorporated this technology into their Bing Search Engine including many other products as well.  

This being said, Apple declined to comment on Siri and Google said it was committed to providing a great virtual assistant to help people on their phones and inside their homes and cars; the company is separately testing a chatbot called “Bard”. Amazon said it saw global with Alexa in the last year and was optimistic about its mission to build world-class AI.  

You should also know that the Assistants and Chatbots are based on two different or separate versions of AI, you could also say that they depend on distinct flavors of AI, Chatbots are powered by what are known as large language models, which are systems trained to recognize and generate text based on enormous data sets taken off of the web. They can then suggest words to complete a sentence.  

In contrast, Siri and other assistants of the sort are known as command-and-control systems. These can understand a finite list of questions and requests like, “Turn off the Kitchen Lights” or “turn on the bedroom lights”.

If a user asks to do something that is not in its code, the bot will simply reject it as it’s not in its ability to do what the user asked it to do. This is the basic reason that the new AI technology has taken the lead toward a better future.