Siri has never been good to me. I have seldom been able to get it to do what I want it to. For a time, since its inception, it was revolutionary. However, whereas intelligence develops with time from its infancy, this hasn’t quite been the case with this artificial intelligence. On the contrary, it seems to have suffered cognitive impairment over time.
Just the other day, I invoked Siri for a rather rudimentary currency conversion. This is the kind of request that even the dullest of intelligence would have no issue understanding, artificial or otherwise. And yet, Siri manages to out do itself as seen below.
How Apple has managed to go back in time in terms of natural language processing is beyond me. However, this called for action and there was nothing else to do apart from relieving Siri of its demanding responsibilities. In comes Google Assistant. For a time Apple did its best to lock out its competitors and hence the introduction of Siri Shortcuts in iOS 12 was interesting to say the least. You simply need to assign a keyword following the “Hey Siri” command and launch your app of choice. So, this brings me to “Hey Siri Google”, invoking which is now child’s play, even for Siri, as can be seen in the leading article animation.
Of course, it won’t be Google without data collection. Considering the fact that I have gone to the extent of deleting my Facebook account, I wasn’t going the distance with Google Assistant. In fact, I didn’t use it at all during its early days due to its “all or nothing” approach. However, since then Google has made a limited mode available that allows one to use the non-personalised features of the Assistant and this is what I have gone ahead with.
This amalgamation of Apple and Google is strange, but effective. Siri of course, still finds a place in my life for its iOS integration but I am glad to have relieved it of all web responsibilities.
