Siri is less than 50% useful when asked a simple question. My kids and I make a joke about it whenever we ask it something in the car. I don't understand how Siri is so exceptionally bad and why Apple didn't do something earlier. It's embarrassing in 2025.
Because there was no competition. Alexa similarly gave up trying to improve theirs after it launched. I've never tried Google's voice assistant but I assume it wasn't very interesting before GPT either.
I'm not convinced it was a technical limitation, even stuff like voice parsing was not improved or basic functionality expanded horizontally.
As a user of all, Google Assistant and Alexa are miles ahead of Siri. Initially I just had Siri, and like you assumed they were all like that. Not the case. No more 'here's what I found on the web' or just not being able to help. Are they integral to my daily life, no, but definitely save time. Siri is just for timers and reminders for me.
I've been a long term Alexa user and kinda hard to get out of the ecosystem, but it's gone downhill fast in the last few years in terms of the UX.
* It forgets about my configured routine ("good night" -> "turn off all lights", now it would randomly reply "good night" and does nothing).
* It keeps trying to push down other services/products on top with long winded follow up question. There's no way to turn this off
* Keep asking if it's answering from the correct room
* Its ability to understand my command has gone downhill - and I'm just ordering it to turn the lights on and off in certain rooms. Now it keeps saying "cannot find bedroom" for example even though there's clearly a group called "Bedroom" set up in Alexa
Alexa sold 500 million devices. Before layoffs, they had 10K staff doing something. Their LLM product recently launched and is rolling out soon, lead by former head of MS Surface.
Yes I own 3 Alexas and still like them. But it's the same device it was when I bought them a decade ago, just occasional new hardware with nicer speakers + more TV/3rd party device integrations. Just like Siri it's software entered total technical stagnation post-launch. Not even the incredibly confusing Alexa settings/management app has improved nor the 3rd party extension marketplace. There's been no strong competition to improve it's technical capabilities as the entire market plateaued and stopped trying very hard.
Plenty of companies have thousands of employees working on stuff that never gets better and at best efficiently maintains status quo, until some competition eats their lunch.
Looking forward to seeing who wins Alexa+ w/ Claude vs Google's Gemini devices, or whoever does ChatGPT voice assistant
One new thing was custom silicon for local, cloud-free audio processing, https://www.slashgear.com/amazon-skips-the-cloud-with-local-.... When combined with US-firmware Zigbee on Echo 4, it allows local device control by voice, without any internet connection. But now they are sadly dropping that to send all audio to the cloud for LLMs.
The failed Alexa software ecosystem was such a lost opportunity, as the device even ran Android. Their hardware ecosystem was more successful, e.g. voice-controlled microwave sold many units with happy customers who still complain about discontinuation of the affordable device. They experimented with niche devices, e.g. make or answer calls on an existing landline, using any Alexa device. Also sadly deprecated, for much weaker VOIP limited to 10 correspondents and random outbound caller ID.
For the elderly (TAM ~= 100% of US humans.. eventually) and disabled, Alexa is life changing. Sadly, Amazon has not invested in those use cases. It's an ideal market for Apple voice control + HomeKit privacy + local LLMs, if and when they get their act together.
