The hype machine is real with Generative AI and ChatGPT, which are seemingly everywhere in tech these days. So it’s not surprising that we’re starting to hear chatter about a new, improved Siri. In fact, 9to5Mac has already spotted a new natural language system.
Do you speak my language?
The claim is that Siri on tvOS 16.4 beta has a new “Siri Natural Language Generation” framework. As described, it doesn’t sound impressive, as it mainly seems focused on telling (dad?) jokes, but might also let you to use natural language to set timers. It is codenamed “Bobcat.”
These whispers follow a recent New York Times report on Apple’s February AI summit. That report claimed the event saw a degree of focus on the kind of generative content and large language models (LLM) used by ChatGPT. It also said Apple’s engineers are “actively testing” language-generating concepts by kicking new language concepts around every week as Apple seeks to move AI forward.
So, is it building a ChatGPT competitor? Not really, according to Bloomberg.
“Hey Siri, how do you spell ‘catch-up’?”
While Siri seemed incredibly sophisticated when it first appeared, development hasn’t kept pace, giving Apple’s cheeky voice assistant echoes of MobileMe and Ping. Like both Apple fails, Siri had promise it never quite lived up to and now lags assistants from Google and Amazon, despite being a little more private.
Siri’s lack of contextual sense means it’s really only good at what it’s trained to do, which limits its abilities; GPT seems to leave it in the dust. With the recent GPT-4 update, OpenAI is innovating fast. We can already see this has lit a fire under the big tech firms. Microsoft has adopted ChatGPT inside Bing, Google’s pressing fast forward on Palm development and Amazon is pushing hard on AWS Chat (the latter now integrated within Microsoft Teams).
Apple — and Siri — seem out on a limb.
Of course, Siri is not the only machine intelligence (MI) Apple works on. In some domains, such as accessibility and image augmentation, it has achieved insanely good examples of MI done right. But, somehow, Siri still makes mistakes.
I’m not entirely sure how Apple’s Steve Jobs would have handled that — I can’t see him being happy when his HomePod tells him it can’t find his Dylan tracks. The difference between the two voice-capable AIs is I could ask GPT to create a picture of him throwing that smart speaker at the wall.
In part,this is because of how Siri’s built.
Siri is sort of a huge database of answers for different knowledge domains supplemented by search results sourced in Spotlight, and natural language interpretation so you can speak to it. When a request is made, Siri checks that it understands the question and then uses deep/machine learning algorithms to identify the appropriate response. To get that response, it makes a numerical assessment (confidence score) of the…
2023-03-19 04:54:05
Post from www.computerworld.com