Apple launched Siri before anyone else and that early advantage became the reason it still cannot catch up today

When Apple launched Siri back in 2011, it was groundbreaking technology, offering folks their very own digital personal assistant for the first time – but since then, it’s struggled to keep up.

Today, there are a bunch of virtual assistants to choose from, including Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft Copilot, as well as newer AI offerings, like ChatGPT. 

But it was Apple’s Siri that was the trailblazer when it came to digital assistants. 

However, despite being the first, these days it’s fallen behind many of its competitors, and here’s what’s to blame.

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Siri was launched in 2011, but hasn’t quite been able to keep up

Although we’re all used to them now, if you cast your mind back 15 years ago, the concept of a digital personal assistant was pretty impressive. 

All you needed to do was call out: “Hey Siri,” and then you could ask it to perform a bunch of basic tasks, like sending a text message, calling someone, or setting a reminder. 

But within a couple of years, the excitement around Siri had turned to frustration for some folks who couldn’t get it to work as it was intended. 

According to the Apple Explained YouTube channel, the big cause of Siri’s problems is the tech it was built on. 

Siri was originally designed by a company called Siri Inc, and was created on a technology framework known as Open Agent Architecture, which was fairly basic and worked by matching keywords. 

It initially launched as an app on iOS before being purchased by Apple. 

The late Apple CEO Steve Jobs was keen to launch Siri on the iPhone 4s, which meant engineers only had about a year to get it ready, and with such a short deadline, they had to remove some features. 

The Apple iPhone 4s was a huge success for Apple, but with millions of people now using Siri, its servers struggled to keep up with demand and would often crash. 

Siri began to experience outages, leaving users frustrated and presenting Apple with a choice: either rebuild Siri from scratch or keep trying to improve the old system. 

Ultimately, Apple chose to stick with the tech it had and instead try to develop and update it to make it better.

And then the competition came along

While all of this was going on with Apple, a slew of new virtual assistants had popped up, and many of them were outperforming Siri. 

Most of these competitor assistants were built on modern cloud-based AI technology, which meant that the companies behind them were able to bring in new features and updates far more quickly, and allowed developers to build integrations. 

Meanwhile, Apple’s Siri was only receiving annual updates, and it took years for developers to be given access.

Apple also initially shied away from AI, but with the introduction of ChatGPT in 2022, it appeared to have a change of heart. 

The following year, Apple started building new AI systems, but it was already years behind its competitors and has struggled to catch up. 

In January, Apple announced that it had struck a deal with Google to bring Gemini AI to the iPhone, and promises to bring some much-needed upgrades to Siri.

So it seems like we’ll have to watch this space to see where Siri goes next.

A quick history of voice assistants

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