Apple has put John Giannandrea exactly where he belongs where his first task will be to fix the schizophrenia that plagues Siri that has done nothing but harm to the appeal of Apple’s digital assistant.
John Giannandrea is a Scottish computer scientist who most recently led Google’s Search and AI activities before being poached by Apple to fix its flagging AI efforts. So far, excellence in AI has not been determined by how many clever people one employs but how by long one has been crunching the data. Therefore, anyone who expects Siri to suddenly earn a PhD overnight is going to be sorely disappointed.
Improving Apple’s AI is going to be a slow, time-consuming process particularly because its focus on privacy has hobbled its ability to use data to train algorithms. However, there is one reasonably quick fix that could be implemented which is to move the implementation of Siri from the device to the cloud. This is where everyone else puts their digital assistants and for good reason.
By implementing the agent on the device rather than in the cloud, Apple has ensured that the user experience of Siri is different from one device to another. This is an understandable decision from a company so rigidly focused on devices and on differentiating with security and privacy, but this decision is now beginning to show some problems. For example, Siri on Apple TV has a different set of skill domains than on the iPhone and Siri on the HomePod is incapable of doing some of the most basic things that are available on the iPhone. This also limits the ability to use Siri to control devices from one another. Furthermore, the third-party skills are all implemented on the device meaning that if the user enables Siri on the iPhone to call an Uber, all of his other devices will remain unable to do it.
It would appear that there is a central repository where the master code line of Siri is developed which is then checked out and customized by product teams to make it more applicable for the device they are creating. This results in fragmentation and inconsistency that wastes R&D resources and hurts the user experience. This is exactly the problem that contributed to Samsung’s and Motorola’s inability to mount a serious challenge to Nokia in feature phones 15 years ago.
In Apple’s case, this a reasonably straightforward fix by moving Siri completely to the cloud which would be a quick and easy win for Apple’s new AI chief. Furthermore, given that Google fully understands the importance of data integration, one would hope that this is already underway.
Even with this fix, Siri will remain hopelessly outclassed by Google Assistant, Baidu Duer OS (in Chinese) and even the decidedly average Amazon Alexa. To catch up with Google, Apple needs to continue to change its AI practices both around its use of data and the way it collaborates with the rest of the AI community. Both of these will be difficult for Apple and so John Giannandera is likely to find that his hands are tied to some degree.
Hence, this field is likely to continue to be led by Google and Baidu for the time being. In the short-term, Apple should fare relatively well given its focus on privacy which is currently proving to be a gadfly for all of the advertising driven digital ecosystems (Facebook, Yahoo, Google etc).
