Siri was first launched in 2011. Despite initial excitement, Apple did not develop their virtual assistant much. Google Assistant caught up rapidly and eventually surpassed Siri in capabilities. It’s the same with Bixby; they have a better, more capable assistant.
Only recently has Apple begun paying attention to Siri. You can now set multiple timers; in the previous iOS versions, you could not use Siri offline. There’s an option to download an offline package to use it now.
However, Siri still lacks contextual information. It’s still objectively far behind when you feed it with continuous inputs. It cannot function well if you ask it a question without elaborating on every single point and fail to remember your initial conversations. There’s no local storage of your queries, so continuous queries with initial context are also not possible.
This is a direct result of Apple’s privacy-centric approach. For an assistant to understand you the best, it must collect as much of your data as possible. It can then use this data to understand you better and increase its relevancy in answers to your queries. Since Apple refuses to store user data on the cloud and processes it without permission, Siri remains one of the worst options for a Virtual Assistant.
Thankfully, there’s apparently an Open AI deal that Apple is closing soon to improve Siri’s performance on iPhones. iOS currently uses AI in the Photos app for Live Text in Photos and Videos. It also uses AI to cut subjects out and create iMessage stickers. There’s also an option to create a replica of your voice. However, Apple’s in-house AI model is not yet complete. As a result, they have to rely on already established and trained AI models from other companies to integrate AI features into iOS.
According to The Information, Apple also plans to integrate a chatbot into iOS. Open AI’s ChatGPT will power it. It is unclear whether consumers must pay a subscription cost to use it or whether it’s free with iOS 18.
Other reports say it won’t come with iOS 18 for older models. Instead, they’ll need the new NPU and processing power of the A18 chipset. As a result, Apple might restrict it only to the upcoming iPhone 16 lineup. Unfortunately, most AI processing happens via the cloud with an internet connection. Very few of them happen offline, and this would mean Apple is artificially limiting features.
Apple has sped up AI engineer hiring in the past year to surpass Pixel’s software in terms of AI features and Samsung’s. Since it’s still not ready, we might have to wait a year before we get proprietary AI features from Apple on iOS.
Siri will improve a lot with this update. ChatGPT has one of the world’s best contextual understanding. It’s Generative and Flexible, unlike Siri. ChatGPT understands you better over time, and the responses become more relevant and detailed over time. The response is a lot closer to how a human would respond. All in all, iOS 18 is shaping up to be a massive upgrade for iOS. We’ll find out more at WWDC 2024 in June.
