AI Race: How Google Assistant, Alexa, Siri Passed The Baton

As the entire world celebrates and gushes over the entry of OpenAI's chatbot ravaging every sector, it is worth remembering how Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant set the stage. 

So, in looking at what language-generative AI has evolved into lately, can we really say these progenitors have lost out in a hypothetical AI race?

Hell, no! On the other hand, as long as they qualify as the 'sires' to today's evolved form popularly called ChatGPT, they are winners.

Part Tracing Of The Evolution Of Chat AI

Way back, on one rainy Tuesday in San Francisco, about 12 years ago, Apple executives took the stage to a packed auditorium to unveil the fifth-generation iPhone.

That smartphone, although outwardly looking identical to the previous generation, had a new innovative feature: Siria virtual assistant.

Scott Fostal, then head of Apple’s software division, pressed an iPhone button to talk to Siri.

At his request, Siri checked the time in Paris (“8:16 p.m.,” she replied), provided a definition for the word “mitosis,” and generated a list of 14 highly rated Greek restaurants, five of which were located in Palo Alto, California.

But this spectacular, by the standards of the time, presentation of Siri was 12 years ago.

Gradually, people began to get used to the entry of virtual assistants using artificial intelligence into their lives, with now familiar products such as Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant.

This technology, however, has remained largely stagnant and often the subject of ridicule and jokes.

Today's Rise and Rise Of Chatbots

The tech world is now turning en masse to a new kind of virtual assistant: chatbots.

These AI-assisted tools like ChatGPT from the company OpenAI can quickly improvise answers to typed questions.

Users now use ChatGPT to handle complex tasks such as coding software, writing business proposals, and writing novels.

As a technology it does not look stagnant at all: ChatGPT, for example, is a chatbot that is improving rapidly, just a few months after its launch.

Just a few days ago, OpenAI introduced its next-generation AI tool, GPT-4, which powers ChatGPT.

In this context, both the excitement surrounding chatbots and their rapid evolution seem to have begun to put virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa on the sidelines of the “race” for dominance in the field of artificial intelligence.

During the last decade, virtual assistants faced many obstacles.

Siri, for example, faced technological hurdles, including unwieldy code that took weeks to update with basic features.

At the same time, Amazon and Google invested in virtual assistant features that users rarely used and thus did not perform as expected.

All this as enthusiasm for said technology gradually waned and waned.

How Do Chatbots Differ From Virtual Assistants?

Assistants and chatbots are based on different versions of artificial intelligence.

Chatbots work with so-called “large language models”, which are systems that have been trained to recognise and produce text based on huge data sets from the web.

They can then suggest words to complete a sentence.

Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant are essentially so-called command and control systems.

This means they can only understand a finite list of questions and requests like, “What’s the weather like in New York?” or “Turn on the bedroom lights.”

So if a user asks the virtual assistant to do something that isn’t included in its code, the bot just says it can’t help, unlike chatbots.

Conclusion

We have to give it to the early language-generative AI adventurers like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant as the pacesetters who saw tomorrow. 

What some may prefer to see as losing can actually be an advantage to the extent that the progenitors of language AI can leverage existing knowledge and background structures to find something far more poignant than the ChatGPT series.