The much-needed reinvention of the voice assistant is almost here

Voice assistants hold great promise, but in the more than a decade since Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa first entered our lives, their most compelling use has still been setting timers. Competition from Google’s Assistant (and if we’re being charitable, Samsung’s Bixby) has failed to ignite the spark of innovation in this area, and in many ways voice control has regressed. These assistants often misunderstand, hear poorly, and sometimes simply don’t listen. They are a far cry from the proactive, truly intelligent digital assistants they were initially touted to be.

Enter generative AI: tech voice assistants must transform them from novel to necessary. This week, at its Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple announced plans to integrate the emerging technology into its long-neglected Assistant, providing Siri with two crucial skills: context and conversation. This is the recipe to keep that initial promise, or at least to bring us much closer.

Apple says its Apple Intelligence will give Siri “all-new superpowers” ​​from better language understanding, awareness of personal context, and the ability to take action on apps on your phone.

Where current Siri needs explicit instructions on what to do and how to do it, Apple promises that this new version will let you say something like: “Siri, what time does mom’s flight land?” ? and the assistant will know how to go through your mail and messages and extract the information. You might then say, “How long will it take me to get there?” » and it should know you mean the airport and display a route and ETA via Maps.

You also won’t need to word commands precisely. Instead of saying “Siri, set a timer for 10 minutes,” you should be able to use a phrase like “Siri, set an alarm for – oh, wait, no, set a timer for 10 minutes.” Actually make it 5”, and the assistant will understand correctly.

These seemingly minor improvements address some of the fundamental problems with voice assistants – not understanding you well enough and requiring you to speak in unnaturally precise ways to get them to do anything – that have turned these promising technologies into only marginally more glorified alarm clocks. .

Siri, Alexa et al. are already artificially intelligent voice assistants: machines that mimic human intelligence through a combination of command and response programming and machine learning. But thanks to the power of generative AI and LLMs, voice assistants could have the ability to generate a response based on what they have learned, rather than simply reacting with existing knowledge.

This should provide the tools needed to create this more conversational and intelligent voice assistant – one that promises to be much more useful than the ones we have today. But all we’ve seen so far are demonstrations of this potential, and none of it exists in real life yet.

Indeed, creating a superintelligent voice assistant is a daunting challenge, with equally enormous potential consequences if it gets wrong. It’s also not as simple as giving Siri and Alexa a ChatGPT-style lobotomy.

Voice assistants, especially those connected to devices and services in our phones and homes, are a different beast than a chatbot in a browser. They have the ability to act in the real world: for example controlling our thermostats and lights and sending emails and messages. This isn’t where you want a potentially hallucinatory AI to take control, and it explains why Apple has carefully sandboxed its ChatGPT integration with Siri.

Amazon is also working on a new and improved voice assistant, and although the company says its generative AI is already built into Alexa components, according to a report from Fortunethe new Alexa isn’t even close to being ready.

The company announced an “all-new, smarter, more conversational Alexa” last fall, powered by a new Alexa LLM, with an impressive demo. It touted an Alexa that should understand conversational phrases for more human interactions, interpret context more effectively, and respond to multiple requests from a single command, like “Alexa, call mom, turn on the living room lights, and lock the door.” entry.”

But we haven’t seen any signs of this super-powered Alexa since, just vague assurances that she’s in a limited preview. This may be due to the fact that, according to Fortunethe company is struggling to merge the old Alexa and its capabilities with its vision of the next-generation voice assistant.

Likewise, Apple takes a slow and steady approach. The new Siri won’t launch until the fall and, even then, will be referred to as a beta. At first, it won’t have a place in the smart home either: It’s not supported on any of Apple’s voice-enabled home devices, such as the HomePod smart speakers and the Apple TV. It’s also not coming to the Apple Watch.

While these devices likely don’t have enough processing power to run generative models, most of which Apple wants to leverage locally for privacy purposes, this seems like a big gap. The smart home is a key space for a smarter voice assistant, not only can it help connect personal and home spaces, but it could also help make running a smart home much easier.

Former Amazon head of devices and services Dave Limp told me last year that the new Alexa LLM they’re building was trained on hundreds of smart home APIs. This could give Alexa the context needed to proactively manage smart home devices like lights, locks, thermostats, etc., making them easier to set up and use, and allowing you to give commands like “Alexa, it’s dark in here and I’m cold,” and the voice assistant will know what to do.

Unlike Apple, Amazon said its new Alexa would be available on all of its Echo smart speakers, including the very first Echo released in 2014. (It can do this by offloading processing to the cloud.) However, as the HomePod Mini is now four years old, so I suspect we’ll see a new model with updated hardware designed for AI very soon. Apple can no longer afford to cede the house any further to Alexa.

Although the stage is set for the second coming of the voice assistant, there’s still a long way to go before we see Act 1. It’s also possible that the series could open with entirely new characters if these companies can’t find a way to do it efficiently. build the new technology on the foundations of the old.

This appears to be the route Google is taking. Its voice assistant Google Assistant has yet to undergo a major AI overhaul, with the company reportedly putting all its resources into the new AI-powered Gemini assistant. While a symbiosis seems like a natural move, given Google’s penchant for ditching the old, it’s entirely possible that the company could launch an entirely new voice assistant built from the ground up on generative AI.

However they get there, the promise of these smart voice assistants is exciting, especially for any company that can effectively merge the personal assistant with the home. Imagine if your HomePod could welcome you home with personalized updates, tell you that you have to leave for your daughter’s school play 15 minutes early due to traffic, and charge your electric vehicle with enough power. autonomy to get there the moment you leave the street. door. It’s a lot closer to what we were promised – and it’s a lot smarter than setting a timer.