A question that continues to loom over the age of conversational AI is the fate of legacy AI assistants. We’re talking Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa, etc. Will the recent inflection in underlying tech – care of GPT – upgrade these tools… or userp them? As we’ve examined, the answer will vary (more on that in a bit).
The latest evidence comes from Microsoft. It has decided to kill off its legacy AI assistant, Cortana, effective this month. In terms of integration and investment, it will be replaced by Bing Chat, which is based on ChatGPT and lives in several Microsoft products such as Bing and the Edge browser.
The decision to double down on Bing Chat while taking Cortana to the woodshed also flows from Microsoft’s feedback loop of recent events. Bing Chat drove a demand inflection for Bing, given that it beat Google to market with a GPT-based integration – partly due to Microsoft’s investment in Open AI.
Brain Transplant
Adding to the above factors, Microsoft’s decision came down to Cortana’s weak market positioning. It was never really able to find a home, nor a sizable market, due to organizational priorities. This is partly because it wasn’t supported to the degree of Google Assistant, nor integrated to the degree of Siri.
Speaking of other players, and back to the part about varying AI strategies, Google sits at the other end of the spectrum. It’s fairly clear from recent moves that Google will treat newer GPT-based technologies as an opportunity to upgrade Assistant. It will essentially get a Chat-GPT brain transplant.
Meanwhile, Siri sits somewhere in the middle. As we speculated on a recent episode of This Week in Local, it could go either way. Siri has ample brand baggage, which would make replacing it with “Apple GPT” logical. Then again, it’s so integrated across Apple products that upgrading may be easier.
As for Amazon, that’s the last domino to fall, and we haven’t heard much yet. Heck, it’s been even quieter than Apple, which is uncharacteristic. Alexa, like Siri, is embedded and integrated widely in Amazon products and that of several consumer-electronics partners. So it may get a stay of execution.
Good Conversationalist
For much of the above, questions will be answered to varying degrees by the companies themselves – in both explicit statements and in triangulating their moves (our job). This will come down to style: We’ll hear a lot from Google as it throws things against the wall to see what sticks. Apple… not so much.
Whether or not these companies maintain the branding of legacy AI assistants, it’s clear that we’re entering a new age of conversational AI that’s much better than what came before it. That statement applies more to some (looking at you Siri) than others, depending on the quality of their legacy apps.
The reason this is all important is that big tech will set the tone for AI tools that end up in our hands. Their AI-assistant software will permeate ubiquitous first-party and third-party products. The good news is that competition amongst them will elevate the AI quality levels we can look forward to.
Ep. 32 Asks Will Apple GPT Kill Siri & Does “X” Mark the Super App?
