A former Apple employee said in a March 16 interview that Apple’s voice assistant Siri’s code design is too outdated and complex to become as powerful as ChatGPT, the OpenAI artificial intelligence chatbot.
Former Apple engineer John Burkey, who was tasked with improving Siri in 2014, left Apple in 2016. He said Siri’s clunky design made it difficult to add new features.
Burkey said Siri was able to answer simple questions like “What’s the weather today?” or “Can you play this song?” by pulling information from a database that stored a lot of words like restaurant locations or musicians’ names. That leaves Siri with a limited number of requests to respond to, he said, and engineers have to keep adding new words to the database to expand its capabilities.
Burkey admits that Apple Siri’s database is “a big snowball,” and adding new words can take up to six weeks because engineers need to overhaul the database, and if it’s integrating advanced features like Chatgpt, such as search, it could even take about a year. Even updating Siri’s basic features could take weeks, because Apple Siri’s code is outdated and complex, Burkey said.
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Right now, especially after OpenAI upgraded its large language model to GPT-4, ChatGPT, the popular artificial intelligence chatbot, is threatening voice assistant technology with new features that people are enthusiastic about.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who recently invested another $10 billion in OpenAI, has said that voice assistants like Apple Siri and Amazon Alexa are “dumb as a rock.
Adam Cheyer, co-founder of Apple Siri, agreed with this statement. He also said that ChatGPT’s ability to automatically write articles and develop code makes existing voice assistants on the market look silly. Cheyer said, “The previous capabilities were just too chickenshit.”
Apple Siri users have noticed this, too, and have expressed their discontent, asking questions like “Why is Siri so dumb?” and “Is Siri getting dumber every year?
But Siri isn’t the only voice assistant in trouble. Last November, it was reported that Amazon’s Alexa division was operating at a loss of more than $3 billion for the year, and was only maintaining a presence.
“Alexa was a huge failure of imagination,” said one former Amazon employee, “and the opportunities were wasted.”
Former Amazon and Google managers revealed that, like Amazon, Google has found itself struggling to generate significant revenue from its voice assistant. However, both Amazon and Google Inc. said they will continue to build their own voice assistant features.
Employees of Apple’s Siri team have reportedly been testing artificial intelligence language models, though no products have been released yet.
