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In 2011, Apple announced that its new iPhone would incorporate a new virtual assistant, based on an application developed by a company acquired by Apple: Siri. The release of iOS 12 this fall marks seven years since the beginning of Siri, which means that the virtual assistant would be pretty much in first year.
Over the next few years, Siri has grown rapidly, expanding its functionality and knowledge base, often with a small fanfare of Apple. On rare occasions, Apple spends some attention to the virtual assistant, for example when he produced a video dedicated to the relationship between the star of action – and the incredibly happy human – Dwayne Johnson and the intelligent agent. But most often, Siri is presented as a facet of other Apple products.
In iOS 12, Apple has undoubtedly brought the biggest improvement in Siri's history, adding the Siri shortcuts feature. The shortcuts unlock a lot of features for the virtual assistant and make it really customizable for the first time, but it also highlights the frustrating shortcomings of the virtual assistant.
Power to users
For the first time, Siri Shortcuts allows users to modify the virtual assistant at their convenience, adding the possibility of custom shortcuts that perform tasks that previous incarnations of the intelligent agent might not have managed. And this personalization is profound: just immerse yourself in the work of Federico Viticci to see what is possible.
Since the creation of Siri, one of the biggest complaints that it was not possible to interact significantly with third-party applications and shortcuts remedied the situation. Dozens of leading third-party apps have already been updated to offer shortcut integration, and Apple is doing its part by showing suggested shortcuts in the Settings app, helping even less technical users take advantage of the shortcuts. new capabilities.
Apple Combine these options with the ability to assign Siri phrases to any type of complex workflow built into the Shortcuts app and you have the potential for all kinds of new features for the virtual assistant. I spent an evening earlier this week creating a shortcut to scan business expense recipes and save them in my own custom format, a workflow that I can trigger by asking Siri to "scan the expenses" .
Amazon's Google Assistant and Alexa have been able to assign a custom keyword to a specific task or set of tasks, but Apple's system is probably more complex and powerful.
Most.
The missing ingredient
As promising as Siri Shortcuts is, it soon becomes clear that there are places where it does not work as well as one might expect. Despite the power of the Shortcuts application – you can run shell scripts on SSH, link applications to run Javascript or Python scripts, and even connect (with a little bit of work) to the IFTTT Web Service – a major missing feature recognizing an arbitrary entry.
It's something Siri does quite well in its native form, thanks to its natural language processing. For example, you can ask Siri to set an alarm for one hour – at any time – and she will understand what you mean. Same thing with sending a message to someone or a phone call. But Siri shortcuts do not really have this capability because they only use pattern recognition: say that exact phrase in this way to execute that workflow. There is nothing really new about this: even the classical Mac OS had a similar feature.
AppleThis means that you can not design Siri shortcuts that accept variables. For example, you can not create a workflow to send a form email to a contact that you specify when you run the command. If you want a shortcut to play a specific podcast in Overcast, you need to create shortcuts for each show you want to play. These are really "shortcuts" in the true sense of the term: the Siri equivalent of a keyboard shortcut.
Siri Trek: The next generation
It is understandable that Siri Shortcuts is somewhat limited. In a sense, there is a fix: a feature that allows Siri to be more useful, perhaps while Apple is working on the extension to extend systems such as SiriKit integration that it offers to third-party developers in a handful of categories. But the processing of natural language by arbitrary and unstructured entries is a challenge, potentially opening a Pandora's box that Apple is not ready to release.
Siri will have to move on to continue his evolution. With the dominance of Alexa, Google Assistant, Cortana and even Bixby, it is clear that virtual assistants are here to stay. And this future is going to imply that these artificial intelligences are able to manage all the information which is launched to them, as would a human assistant.
Shortcuts are a powerful tool in Siri's arsenal, whose usefulness will only increase as new third-party applications adopt it. But it's complex enough to make it obvious that a little more complexity is needed if we want to move on to the next generation of virtual assistant technology.
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