FEBRUARY 2020 MACWORLD 51It’s 2020, Apple is apparently The Privacy
Tech Company™, and yet Siri won’t even work
without an internet connection.
can say, “Where is she?” and my phone
will open to her results in Find My
Friends, because I have her added
there. A true next-gen Siri should seek to
draw proper context from anything on
my iPhone or iPad’s display, in addition
to the ambient sound, location—the full
suite of sensor data.
THE SIRI EXPERIENCE NEEDS A
DRAMATIC OVERHAUL
Google may not sell as many Pixel
phones as Apple does iPhones. The
future of Apple may be services, not just
hardware. But Apple would be well-
advised to look at Google’s latest phone
and feel a sense of paranoia. No
advantage sticks around forever, and no
ecosystem has a moat too big to cross.
Apple should make beating Google
Assistant as big a priority as it must have
been to beat the Pixel’s camera.
It will have to “skate where the puck
is going (go.macworld.com/puck),” as
the saying goes, to envision Google
Assistant several years out and
architect a completely new Siri
experience to beat it. Hopefully, Apple
recognized its long-lost leadership
position in this area years ago and has
been architecting a next-generation Siri
experience for a long time.
The iPhone of the future needs more
than an incredible camera, 5G connectivity,
and a superfast processor. Apple keeps
reminding us that machine learning is used
in all aspects of the operating system. It’s
time to tie all that intelligence together and
surface it in a whole new Siri experience,
instead of continuing to iteratively improve
this iPhone 4s interaction model. It’s time
for a whole new Siri experience that fully
integrates with everything we do with our
phones and runs entirely on-device
wherever possible.
If Siri continues to evolve in the ways it
has recently—adding a domain here or
there, improving its voice, delivering
slightly better results to specific types of
queries—it will be left hopelessly in the
dust by Google Assistant on Android
phones and Alexa on, well, everything
else. It’s already way behind, and pretty
soon, consumers are going to really start
to notice. ■