While Amazon offered a “skills” store to make Alexa control third-party accessories like light switches, it was difficult for people to find and set up skills for the speakers - unlike the friction-free experience of downloading mobile apps from app stores. The company also underinvested in creating an ecosystem for people to easily expand Alexa’s abilities, in the way that Apple had done with its App Store, which helped stoke interest in the iPhone, the person said. But while people had fun playing with Alexa’s ability to answer weather prompts and set alarms, few asked Alexa to order items, he added.Īmazon may have overinvested in making new kinds of hardware, like now-discontinued alarm clocks and microwaves that worked with Alexa, which sold at or below cost, the former executive said. (In contrast, Apple successfully used Siri to entice buyers to its iPhones.)Īfter Amazon released the Echo, a smart speaker powered by Alexa, in 2014, the company hoped the product would help it increase sales in its online store by enabling consumers to talk to Alexa to place orders, said a former Amazon leader involved with Alexa. That meant there was no path for Siri to become a creative assistant like ChatGPT, he said.Īlexa and Google Assistant relied on technology similar to Siri’s, but the companies struggled to generate meaningful revenue with the assistants, former managers at Amazon and Google said. Adding more complex features like new search tools could take nearly a year. So seemingly simple updates, like adding some new phrases to the data set, would require rebuilding the entire database, which could take up to six weeks, Mr. If someone wanted to add a word to Siri’s database, he added, “it goes in one big pile.” That made it “one big snowball,” he said. Siri’s database contains a gigantic list of words, including the names of musical artists and locations like restaurants, in nearly two dozen languages. Burkey, who was given the job of improving Siri in 2014. Siri also had a cumbersome design that made it time-consuming to add new features, said Mr. These can understand a finite list of questions and requests like “What’s the weather in New York City?” or “Turn on the bedroom lights.” If a user asks the virtual assistant to do something that is not in its code, the bot simply says it can’t help. In contrast, Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant are essentially what are known as command-and-control systems. They can then suggest words to complete a sentence. Chatbots are powered by what are known as large language models, which are systems trained to recognize and generate text based on enormous data sets scraped off the web. The assistants and the chatbots are based on different flavors of A.I. People have used ChatGPT to handle complex tasks like coding software, drafting business proposals and writing fiction. These A.I.-powered bots, such as ChatGPT and the new ChatGPT Plus from the San Francisco company OpenAI, can improvise answers to questions typed into a chat box with alacrity. The tech world is now gushing over a different kind of virtual assistant: chatbots. The technology has largely remained stagnant, and the talking assistants have become the butt of jokes, including in a 2018 “ Saturday Night Live” sketch featuring a smart speaker for seniors. Since then, people have been far from blown away by Siri and competing assistants that are powered by artificial intelligence, like Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant. field for a long time, and this still blows me away,” Mr. At his request, Siri checked the time in Paris (“8:16 p.m.,” Siri replied), defined the word “mitosis” (“Cell division in which the nucleus divides into nuclei containing the same number of chromosomes,” it said) and pulled up a list of 14 highly rated Greek restaurants, five of them in Palo Alto, Calif. Scott Forstall, then Apple’s head of software, pushed an iPhone button to summon Siri and prodded it with questions. The phone, which looked identical to the previous version, had a new feature that the audience was soon buzzing about: Siri, a virtual assistant. On a rainy Tuesday in San Francisco, Apple executives took the stage in a crowded auditorium to unveil the fifth-generation iPhone.
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