Hey guys it’s Greg with Apple Explained, and today we’re taking a look at the History
of Siri.
Remember Siri being introduced on stage alongside the iPhone 4s? It was an incredible moment
that impressed not only the audience but also tech critics like Walt Mossberg who called
it a standout feature of the 4s. But Siri didn’t evolve as quickly as most expected
and now the same people who were praising Siri back in 2011 are now asking why Siri
seems so dumb! What went wrong with Siri and how did it fall so far behind its competition?
Well the answer can be found in examining the path Siri has been on since its development
back in 2005.
You may not have known this, but Siri wasn’t made by Apple. It was built by the SRI International
Artificial Intelligence Center and they made it available as an app on the iOS app store
in 2010. The signature voice for Siri was provided by voice actress Susan Bennett, and
there were also British and Australian voices available for Siri provided by Jon Briggs
and Karen Jacobson.
After the Siri app had been live for two months, Apple acquired the company and integrated
the voice assistant into the iPhone 4s. Apple then removed the Siri app and limited the
feature to the 4s even though the app had supported the iPhone 4. It was clear Apple
used Siri as the new shiny feature to entice customers to upgrade their devices, but we
know the feature could’ve been made available for at least the iPhone 4 since Troughton-Smith,
working with an anonymous partner, managed to hack Siri and enabled it to run on the
iPhone 4 and iPod Touch. Apple later included Siri on the iPod Touch and iPad in 2012, the
Apple TV in 2015, and the Mac in 2016.
Other tech companies jumped into the AI market with more than half a dozen Siri-like services
launched in 2012 alone. Samsung debuted S-Voice, a voice-controlled assistant. Nuance, a provider
of speech recognition software, released a “Siri for apps” called Nina. Startups
Evi and Maluuba each released virtual assistant apps. IBM began working on adapting Watson
into a turbo-charged Siri that could help physicians, farmers, Wall Street traders and
students. And Google followed Siri with its own conversational assistant, Google Now.
The early versions of these voice assistants often performed worse than Siri and this positioned
Apple as a leader in the industry. But this changed. And it was because of a difficult
decision Apple made that no other company embraced. Apple decided that they would not
collect data on the inquiries users made with Siri. They kept as much data on the local
device as possible, and if inquiries needed to be sent to the cloud, Apple stripped the
request of any reference to the User ID and assigned it a random request ID. It was then
encrypted and sent up to the cloud for more voice recognition to identify the words, and
for natural language processing to understand the meaning and serve an appropriate response.
This is the same process Siri uses today and it’s a major reason why Apple lost its dominance
in the AI market. Apple’s competitors like like Google and Facebook became more creative
and aggressive about leveraging user data and cloud computing to make their assistants
more and more helpful. This came with the benefit of a smarter voice assistant, but
turned their customers into products whose information would be sold to the highest bidder.
After all, they’re advertising companies which means monetizing user data is their
primary source of revenue. Apple, on the other hand, enjoys earning about 75% of their revenue
from hardware and is in a much better position to pass up the opportunity to monetize their
users data.
But the way these tech companies were handling user data wasn’t fully understood until
recently with the Cambridge Analytica incident, so from the users point of view, Siri’s
progress appeared to be pretty stagnant compared to Google Now, Amazon Alexa, and Microsoft
Cortana. This contributed to an opinion in the tech community that Apple was losing its
ability to innovate. Even the Wall Street Journal wrote, “Apple is playing catch-up
in a product category it invented, increasing worries about whether the technology giant
has lost some of its innovation edge.” With this mounting pressure from customers, journalists,
and competitors, Apple could have easily caved and began mining user data like every other
company. But they held strong to their belief that customer data should remain private.
But this position didn’t stop Apple from making improvements to Siri. A year after
its introduction, iOS 6 brought several new features. It could understand and answer sports
related questions. You could simply speak to Siri and get game schedules, scores, player
info and team records. Siri supported baseball, basketball, football, soccer and hockey including
a number of sports leagues. This is also when Siri’s AI engine became really good at
understanding comparison inquiries like “who’s taller LeBron or Kobe,” and respond with
the right answer.
Along with sports, Siri also gained the ability to understand movie related questions. By
tapping into Rotten Tomatoes’ database, Siri could now display movie reviews and ratings.
She could also supply movie listings based on location or showtime.
Requesting information about a particular movie also became possible. Movie information
was presented in a neat card that aggregated all relevant information, and organized them
into a compact view. It included awards, cast members, ratings and trailers. You could
even ask Siri to play a trailer, which launched in the movie player.
It also gained a number of new restaurant specific features. You could find restaurants
based on cuisine, price, location and ratings. Integration with Yelp and Open Table were
also added, so you could see reviews, ratings, and photos of restaurants within Siri, and
if you liked a place you could tell Siri to take you in to the OpenTable app to make a
reservation.
It was integrated with Facebook and Twitter so you could use Siri to quickly post a status
update. And the ability to open apps with Siri was also included.
A year later, iOS 7 introduced even more changes to Siri. The most noticeable improvement was
the user interface. It took over the entire screen rather than sliding up from the bottom
and occupying only a portion of the display. “What can I help you with?” appeared when
Siri was activated, and a new waveform ran along the bottom to give users a visual cue
when Siri was listening.
Another major change was Apple’s decision to ditch Google in favor of Bing for web searches.
But you could still access Google with Siri by saying “search google” before an inquiry.
A common problem for Siri at the time was it’s struggle with requests for trivial
information, an area where its competition began to excel. Apple tried to remedy this
by integrating Wikipedia with Siri, but it was a clumsy solution since it only worked
with general inquiries and the user had to search for information themselves on the Wikipedia
page instead of Siri providing a specific answer.
iOS 7 also gave Siri the ability to adjust certain system settings like airplane mode,
bluetooth, screen brightness, and do not disturb mode. Apple also introduced a new male voice
for Siri and made the female voice more clear and natural.
iOS 8 introduced the popular “hey siri” voice command so you could summon Siri handsfree.
It was also integrated with Shazam so you could identify a song without opening the
app by asking Siri, “what’s this song.” Another interesting capability was purchasing
iTunes content with Siri.
In iOS 9 contextual awareness was the biggest updated made. If you asked Siri to remind
you to do something while looking at a message you’ve received, Siri would understand what
you meant and add the event. Siri also became more aware of location, so a very specific
reminder like "Call mom when I get in the car" was possible. Siri’s smarts was brought
to the search window with Siri Suggestions which included a list of people you speak
with often, apps you might want to use depending on the time of day, nearby venues like restaurants
and gas stations, and relevant news. This section was also contextually aware and offered
different content based on the time of day.
With the announcement of iOS 10 in 2016, Apple opened up third-party developer access to
Siri through a dedicated API that restricted usage of Siri to engaging with third-party
messaging apps, payment apps, ride-sharing apps, and Internet calling apps.
In iOS 11 Apple gave Siri improved male and female voices that were designed to more closely
mimic natural human speech. Apple said Siri's new voice options were powered by deep learning
for better pronunciation and a more expressive voice. It also got a new user interface and
could translate phrases from English to Chinese, French, German, Italian, and Spanish, with
more languages to come. Siri also began using on-device learning to understand more about
your preferences and interests to better anticipate what you might want next. And it would sync
that information across all your Apple devices so the Siri experience was the same regardless
of what product you were using.
Despite these consistent updates Siri has received over the years, it’s still lagging
behind the competition today and has lots of room for improvement.
Norman Winarsky, one of the creators of Siri, recently spoke about its current state, how
far the personal assistant has come, and how much different it is now than what he originally
envisioned. According to Winarsky, Siri was originally meant to be a virtual travel and
entertainment concierge.
The idea was if you needed something done related to these areas, Siri would take care
of it for you. So if you showed up at the airport and your flight was delayed, then
Siri would automatically work on finding you a different flight. And if that didn’t work,
Siri would find you a nearby hotel room to try and accommodate your needs:
Winarsky said, “were you to arrive at an airport to discover a cancelled flight, for
example, Siri would already be searching for an alternate route home by the time you pulled
your phone from your pocket—and if none was available, would have a hotel room ready
to book. It would have a smaller remit, but it would learn it flawlessly, and then gradually
extend to related areas. Apple launched Siri as an assistant that can help you in all areas
of your life, a bigger challenge that will inevitably take longer to perfect.”
Today, Siri is something that goes beyond travel and entertainment, and it’s easy
to say that the development process that Winarsky had originally envisioned (to make Siri work
perfectly in a couple of areas first, and then expand from there) is not something Apple
is really following. Siri tries to do a lot of things, some of those things it can do
well enough, and others not so much. Winarsky says that Apple’s efforts are exceptionally
hard as the company has to deal with a lot of customers out in the real world, but adds
that Apple may be working for a “level of perfection they can’t get”.
But I should mention that based on its latest tests, Siri was capable of recognizing 95%
of a users speech, putting it on par with Amazon Alexa and Microsoft Cortana. The issues
arise when considering how Siri responds to our inquiries. Sometimes it doesn’t give
us quite the information we were asking for, and this is the area where Siri’s shortcomings
are revealed.
Greg Joswiak, Apple’s Vice President of iPod, iPhone and iOS Product Marketing said
“From the beginning, Apple wanted Siri to be a get-stuff-done machine. It drives me
crazy that people compare virtual assistants by asking trivia questions, which always makes
Siri look bad. We didn’t engineer this thing to be Trivial Pursuit!”
So, not like Trivial Pursuit, and more like a digital personal assistant meant to help
users get something done. Which, all things considered, Siri does accomplish fairly reliably.
So how often do you use Siri? Some friends of mine never use it while others push its
capabilities to the limit. I typically only use Siri for making calls, sending quick texts,
and setting timers. Let me know how Siri has been working for you and if you enjoyed the
video, don’t forget to leave a like. Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next time.