Former Apple employee says Siri will never be as powerful as ChatGPT, details here

By Divyanshi SharmaFor most of us, the first ever AI experience that we had was by talking to either Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa. The two voice assistants gained huge popularity a couple of years back and soon became a part of our lives. Be it by helping us answer a call or setting the alarm, Siri certainly makes our lives easier. Siri was unveiled as part of iPhone 4S’ feature in 2011.

We’re in 2023 now and voice assistants have become rather common. The new shining artificial intelligence product in town is ChatGPT, the AI chatbot that went viral after its launch in November 2022. While Siri only helped performed tasks of a certain level and directed us to informative links online when we asked a question, ChatGPT responds to questions in a human-like manner and there’s no need to go through any webpage to get the information. Apart from that, ChatGPT can also write code, compose poetry, write articles, and whatnot. And with the newly-launched GPT-4, its capabilities have grown even more.

Siri no match for ChatGPT

Amidst all this, a former Apple employee has said that Siri can never be as powerful as ChatGPT. According to a report in The New York Times, John Burkey worked as an engineer with Apple and was assigned the task to help improve Siri in 2014. He left the company in 2016 and said that Siri’s ‘clunky design made it time-consuming to add new features’.

The publication quoted the former Apple employee saying that even updates that seemed simple, ‘like adding some new phrases to the data set, would require rebuilding the entire database, which could take up to six weeks’. He added that adding more complex features (to Siri) like new search tools could therefore take nearly a year. “That meant there was no path for Siri to become a creative assistant like ChatGPT,” he said, as per The New York Times.

When Satya Nadella criticised voice assistants

Earlier, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had also said that voice assistants like Siri, Alexa and Cortana were ‘dumb as a rock’ in an interview with Financial Times. He had further said, “Whether it’s Cortana or Alexa or Google Assistant or Siri, all these just don’t work. We had a product that was supposed to be the new front-end to a lot of [information] that didn’t work.”

In 2014, Microsoft had introduced Cortana as an inbuilt AI assistant who could aid users with a number of tasks such as organising their meetings, creating reminders, helping with search, and so on. However, the voice assistant wasn’t a popular choice on smartphones.