Apple’s Siri was the first virtual assistant to grace our smartphones, but it only took about five years before newer competitors like Google’s Assistant—which could more freely search the web for answers—made it seem a little clunky. Now, nearly 13 years after that 2011 launch, Siri is looking positively antiquated.
The advent of generative AI is to blame. Siri was always an AI assistant of sorts—machine learning, which is a subset of AI, is what gives it the ability to understand spoken commands and requests—but the world has come to expect so much more of AI, particularly since OpenAI's seminal release of the ChatGPT chatbot in late 2022.
