Siri’s Gone M.I.A.
Siri used to be one of the most important elements of Apple’s software lineup.
But at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, the virtual assistant got about as much attention as a $999 monitor stand. Maybe less.
Siri is so central to Apple’s software that it’s the only real application you can launch with a physical button, but the most substantial new feature it’s been given since 2011 are user-built “shortcuts,” which was launched last year.
Of course, Siri isn’t the only reason Apple develops artificial intelligence. The addition of accessibility features like Voice Control and Augmented Reality show that the company is working to refine speech understanding and computer vision. But virtual personal assistants have become a crown jewel for tech companies, a concrete marker to show how advanced these companies have become.
For some reason, Apple has stopped playing the game.
These conferences, for better or worse, have become events for large tech companies to lord their research department’s prototypes over an audience of developers hoping to piggyback off the technology for their own applications. Google and Microsoft have tried to make big splashes with A.I. product and prototype announcements. Even Samsung is trying to figure out new uses for its “Bixby” assistant.
Virtual personal assistants are the best example of this showboating. They’re easily demonstrable, and the initial success of Alexa and Siri suggests many people understand how they work. (See: “The Octogenarians Who Love Amazon’s Alexa.”)
Last month at Microsoft Build, CEO Satya Nadella introduced an upcoming version of Cortana he promised would be far more conversational and aware of context from calendar invites and emails. A day later, Google announced an entirely hands-free workflow with the Google Assistant, which will soon process voice commands on the Pixel phones without having to connect to Google servers. On the Siri front, Apple announced… just about nothing.
This might be due to internal turmoil surrounding the previous development of Siri. The team developing the virtual assistant had been plagued with infighting and differing visions for the product since its launch, according to a wide-ranging report from The Information in 2018.
Earlier this year, Bill Stasior, who had run Siri since 2012, switched to another role at Apple. Siri is now under the command of John Giannandrea, the former head of Google’s A.I. and search teams.
Despite the shake-ups within the Siri program, Apple has been aggressively pursuing A.I. talent. Earlier this year, the company recruited Ian Goodfellow, a renowned A.I. researcher who worked under Giannandrea at Google and invented the generative adversarial network, which allows algorithms to create realistic images. Goodfellow is now director of machine learning at Apple’s special project group, according to LinkedIn. Apple also brought on Ruslan Salakhutdinov to lead its A.I. research team in 2017 — at the time, he led work on projects like heart rate sensing and lidar.
One major takeaway from all of this is that Apple doesn’t need a glowing light and a soothing voice to leverage A.I. for better products. During the accessibility portion of the WWDC keynote, Apple unveiled a new feature called Voice Control, where all native apps could be completely controlled by a user’s voice. It’s a similar idea to Google’s Assistant, but Apple didn’t boast about its speech-to-text processing or A.I.-backed natural language understanding.
Apple is also infusing its Augmented Reality platform with more A.I. features, as well. It’s working with Microsoft to create Minecraft Earth, a version of the game where players gather materials they see in Augmented Reality and build digital structures overlaid on the real world. A player’s digital avatar is projected in AR to other players, so when someone waves in real life, their avatar does as well. Apple didn’t boast about this being an A.I. advancement, even though pose estimation is very much in the realm of A.I. research — it was just marketed as a feature for its new game.
Apple’s AR occlusion has a similar story. The company built the algorithm that outlines where objects seen through the camera are, so AR objects can “pass behind” people in a convincing manner. By building these core tools, Apple is levering its own research and product teams to create a foundation from which third-party app developers can build.
The question remains whether Apple, the first company to launch a virtual personal assistant, will be able to rehabilitate Siri — or whether Siri is ever going to be anything other than a voice platform to launch other apps.
Maybe Apple hasn’t found its “killer app” for voice yet: Data on voice speakers that’s admittedly a few years old suggests that the most common uses for virtual assistants are playing music and setting timers.
Either way, nothing Apple has done seems to indicate that Siri is becoming less important of a product. The new AirPods make it easier to invoke Siri, and Siri Shortcuts allows users to tailor the assistant to their specific needs.
No matter how Apple downplays the A.I. in its products, however, the silence on Siri’s core functionality is noticeable. Apple might be putting A.I. somewhere in its lineup of products, but it’s definitely not putting it in Siri.
Tech hardware is increasingly being defined by the virtual personal assistants that they’re bundled with. It’s the virtual representation of the operating system in a conversational form. Now more than ever, as Google flexes its A.I. expertise in the Google Assistant, Apple needs something to prove that there are (and will be) reasons to keep buying its products. And with this year’s WWDC as a guide, that reason won’t be Siri.
Siri’s Gone M.I.A.
Research & References of Siri’s Gone M.I.A.|A&C Accounting And Tax Services
Source
0 Comments