Apple’s voice assistant Siri gave it a considerable head start in the chatbot race. So why has Apple never had a ChatGPT-style breakthrough in the new AI era?
Babak Hodjat, one of the inventors of the backend natural language processing technology that led to the development of Siri, has a theory. He thinks Apple didn’t capitalize on its early lead with the voice assistant because the company was too narrowly focused on its visual appeal rather than the quality of users’ interactions with it.
“They would be nitpicky about the look and feel of Siri,” Hodjat told Business Insider in an interview at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon this month.
Apple didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The original idea and technology behind Siri dates back to the late 1990s. Hodjat was the chief technology officer at a startup called Dejima, which he cofounded with friends from Kyushu University, in Japan. Dejima invented and patented agent-oriented technology that became part of the basis for a large-scale US government-funded AI research project called CALO, or Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes. In 2007, a group of engineers from the project — which didn’t include Hodjat — created a startup called Siri to commercialize the technology. Three years later, Apple acquired Siri and then rolled it out for mass-market use in iPhones in 2011. Hodjat wasn’t involved with Siri after the Apple acquisition.
Hodjat is now the chief AI officer at the professional services firm Cognizant, where he is responsible for a team of AI scientists and researchers within the company’s innovation labs.
In Hodjat’s view, as an outside observer, the initial rollout of Siri primarily as a voice assistant was also a misstep. Apple did place more emphasis on the ability to “type to Siri” when it introduced its Apple Intelligence AI system last year.
“When we started at Dejima, modality to us was secondary. You can talk, you can type, it depends on where you are, and how you’re interacting,” Hodjat said.
Trying to have a conversation aloud with an inanimate object, such as a phone, can make some people feel uncomfortable, he added.
“It is surprisingly easier to talk to your car, maybe because it moves and its headlights look like eyes, than it is to your fridge,” Hodjat said.
While there might be some discomfort, voice assistants on devices such as smartphones, wearables, and speakers are expected to reach 148.7 million users this year, according to a forecast from the research firm EMARKETER, a sister company of Business Insider. Siri is forecast to notch up around 87.3 million users in 2025, per EMARKETER’s May forecast.
Despite the wide adoption, Apple has struggled to upgrade Siri for the AI age. Apple was forced to delay a planned overhaul of Siri earlier this year. Now, the company is nearing a deal to have Google’s Gemini model handle some of Siri’s features, Bloomberg reported this month, citing people with knowledge of the matter.
Hodjat said a Gemini deal would be a “smart move” for Apple, “but only if they stay with it.”
“They keep changing their minds on this thing,” he said.
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