Apple’s voice assistant Siri gave the company a clear lead in the race for chatbots. So why has Apple never made a ChatGPT-like breakthrough in the new AI era?
Babak Hodjat, one of the inventors of the backend natural language processing technology that led to the development of Siri, has a theory. He believes Apple didn’t take advantage of its early lead with the voice assistant because the company relied too heavily on visual impact rather than on the quality of interaction.
“They were picky about how Siri looked and felt,” Hodjat told Business Insider (BI) on the sidelines of the Web Summit conference in Lisbon.
Apple did not respond to a request for comment.
The original idea and technology behind Siri dates back to the late 1990s. At the time, Hodjat was the chief technology officer of a startup called Dejima, which he founded with friends from Kyushu University in Japan.
Dejima developed and patented agent-oriented technology that became the basis of a large-scale, federally funded US research project called CALO (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes).
In 2007, a group of engineers from the project – excluding Hodjat – founded a startup called Siri to commercialize the technology. Three years later, Apple adopted Siri and released the assistant in its mass-market iPhones in 2011. Hodjat was not involved in Siri even after the Apple acquisition.
Today, Hodjat is Chief AI Officer at the consulting firm Cognizant, where he is responsible for a team of AI experts in the company’s innovation laboratories.
Hodjat believes it was a mistake that Siri initially came onto the market primarily as a voice assistant. Apple made the ability to text rather than speak to Siri more prominent when it launched its Apple Intelligence system last year.
“When we started at Dejima, for us the type of interaction was secondary. You can talk, you can type – it depends on where you are and how you interact,” Hodjat said.
Talking loudly to an inanimate object such as a telephone can unsettle many people, he added. “Surprisingly, it’s easier to talk to a car – maybe because it’s moving and the headlights look like eyes – than to the fridge,” Hodjat said.
Despite certain inhibitions, voice assistants on devices such as smartphones, wearables and speakers are expected to have 148.7 million users this year, predicts the market research company Emarketer, a sister company of BI. Siri is expected to reach around 87.3 million users in 2025, according to an Emarketer forecast from May.
