MATT BOLTON…
BELIEVES THAT NOW IS THE TIME FOR FOR US TO SAY “HEY SIRI, SHAPE UP OR SHIP OUT”, AND FOR SIRI TO BE TOP OF THE AI LEAGUE
A voice assistant on the iPhone needs to feel as versatile as the phone itself
Siri is like the Arsenal of voice assistants. There’s no competition between it and Liverpool (Alexa) and Man City (Google Assistant) when it comes to performance, but no one inside the club (Apple) is going to admit to that, despite the fact that in both cases coming in third is the best we can expect. Meanwhile, fans are left to wonder why progress feels so slow overall, despite very occasional bursts of improvement.
In iOS 15, we got a sumptuous-looking buffet of Siri updates, but they all had the same goal: making Siri’s existing functions work better. We got offline processing for certain commands and better contextual understanding, but without actually expanding the limits of what you can do with it. In fact, Apple removed a bunch of stuff from SiriKit for developers, and it’s already behind on its ability to deliver knowledge compared to Alexa or Google Assistant.
And it’s not just behind in terms of performance – it feels more behind because of where it lives. A voice assistant that feels at home on the iPhone needs to feel as versatile as the phone itself. Part of the attraction of the iPhone is the infinite expandability of the App Store – it’s like it has all these extra features already built in, and you can choose which to activate. But Siri feels restrictive and small by comparison. SiriKit never felt like much of a solution to this, because it feels like it can only offer you a tiny fraction of what a compatible app can do, and then only if you ask in a specific Aramaic dialect on the second Tuesday of the month during the blood moon.
Here’s the thing; you can kind of say the same about Alexa and its Skills, which are third-party expansions to Alexa. You have to use specific language triggers with them, which each Skill will show you when you install it. But the magic of Alexa is that it works the same across any device. You might get different Siri responses depending on whether you ask on iPhone, Watch or HomePod. Alexa is your Alexa. It works in the app, from an Echo, on a TV. You know its possibilities… and it benefits from you knowing its limits. You have no expectation that it should tie into your note-taking app of choice, or a specific messaging app.
But Siri is the assistant on your iPhone/ Mac/etc, and if it doesn’t work with how you use the devices, then it feels behind the curve even if it offers the same as the competition in a lot of ways, because you can see all the things that it doesn’t do. I’m writing this just before WWDC, so I hope Apple stops polishing the Siri we’ve had for 10 years and gives us the future where voice is a natural alternative to tapping on your phone, no matter which apps you use.
ABOUT MATT BOLTON
Matt is the editor for Apple and home tech at T3 and has been charting changes at Apple since his student days. He’s sceptical of tech industry hyperbole, but still gets warm and fuzzy on hearing “one more thing”.
When you’re listening to audio while out on a walk, the last thing you want is for your headphones to die at the best bit of your favourite song or the plot twist of the latest audiobook. With Urbanista’s solarpowered Los Angeles headphones, that never has to be a problem again. This issue, we’ve got three pairs to give away to a set of lucky winners.
We reviewed them in last month’s MacFormat (MF378) and praised their “astounding” battery life. Not only do they come with a huge 80-hour reserve of on-board battery power, but the headband includes a built-in solar strip, meaning they charge up as you simply walk around outside. That means charging could become a thing of the past for you.
The headphones come with active noise cancellation and an ambient noise mode too. The former cuts out distracting sounds while the latter enables you to hear more of your surroundings, and both performed admirably in our testing.
And let’s not forget how pleasing these cans are to look at. In fact, if you didn’t know any better, you’d be hard pressed to find the solar strip that juices up the battery so effectively.
That’s because Urbanista has done a remarkable job of blending it seamlessly into the headband, and that pays dividends with a contemporary headset that will turn heads for all the right reasons. So you’ll be sorted for both audio style and power.