They created Siri before Apple bought it. They’re still waiting for their original vision to come true

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Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer, known for creating an assistant that’s now found in billions of Apple devices, have been thinking about what comes after the search engine for a long time.

They, along with Tom Gruber, founded a startup in 2007 stemming from a product concept the pair developed at the Stanford Research Institute. They called it Siri and aimed to create a “do engine.”

“We used to say, ‘If you want to find a web page, go to a search engine like Google,’” Cheyer told CNN in August. “’If you want to get something done, go to a ‘do engine: Siri.’”

Siri has been an iPhone mainstay since Apple bought the company for more than $200 million, according to reports at the time , and introduced it on the iPhone 4S in 2011. But most users only use Siri for simple tasks like setting alarms or queuing up music.

The tech giant wants that to change Monday, when it begins rolling out the all-new Siri as part of its new iOS 27 software.

Siri has been rebuilt for the AI era, the company said . The new Siri AI can analyze what’s on an iPhone’s screen, operate apps, and leverage information from your calendar, messages and other iPhone apps in its responses. Apple hopes these functions will give it a leg up over rivals like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.

Kittlaus and Cheyer, who are no longer involved in Siri’s development and left Apple shortly after Siri was acquired, agree that Apple’s massive App Store, the ubiquity of products like the iPhone and Apple Watch, and the company’s focus on consumer privacy could give the new AI assistant an edge in the competition.

Big Tech companies – including Apple – have tried to create an AI assistant that can handle tasks for consumers for more than a decade. But to achieve that goal, AI assistants must understand speech the way humans do and work seamlessly with the apps consumers use everyday without jeopardizing privacy.

“The whole world is going after this kind of vision,” Cheyer told CNN.

Apple has been under a microscope following criticism that it’s fallen behind in AI.

The new version of Siri comes nearly four years after ChatGPT first launched. Meanwhile, Google and Samsung have woven AI tools throughout Android’s interface, such as the ability to analyze and search for content being shown on screen and make suggestions based on what you’re doing on your phone .

Kittlaus, who worked at Apple in 2010 and 2011 following Siri’s acquisition, said Apple typically prioritizes its own products and may not have had a pulse on the AI shift initially.

“I think that’s just a function of how Apple generally operates, which is they’re super focused on the next product launches,” Kittlaus said.

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Apple delayed the launch of its revamped Siri last year because it said it needed more time to deliver on features announced in 2024.

Kittlaus and Cheyer both said they think Apple is well-positioned to bring Siri closer to their original vision of a “do engine.” Being able to use information from your Apple devices to answer personal questions – not just general knowledge questions one might search the internet for – could set Apple apart .

When CNN tested a beta version of Siri AI, the assistant found an upcoming dentist appointment using a confirmation text in the Messages app. It also pulled up more details about a band that a friend recommended in a text message, and sent a recipe for a cabbage salad on Instagram to the Siri app so that I could view it later when asked.

Google, which owns the Android operating system as well as popular apps like Gmail and Google Maps, has a similar advantage.

But Apple is betting that its focus on privacy will make consumers feel more comfortable trusting Siri. Apple uses a system called Private Cloud Compute for AI tasks that are too powerful to process locally; the system only sends data that’s relevant to the specific task to Apple’s servers. It’s also expanded that system to Google Cloud, since Apple uses Gemini for some of its AI features.

The next major obstacle for Siri and other AI assistants may be the tech industry’s business model.

Technical hurdles previously made it challenging for virtual assistants to be useful for more than setting alarms, playing music or managing smart home devices. AI helpers like Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and the Google Assistant weren’t always very good at understanding people or answering questions unless questions were phrased in a specific way. And using AI assistants to order a pizza or book a ride from Uber requires users to manually connect it to the app. In many cases, it was easier to just complete the task yourself.

But a lot has changed over the past decade.

Large language models have made it easier for AI assistants to understand broad commands, execute multistep tasks and take actions across apps. Apple and other tech giants are working towards a future where users don’t need to open apps and can just ask an AI to handle things.

That could create big concerns for the companies making those apps, according to Kittlaus and Cheyer. If users rely on Siri, Gemini or ChatGPT for shopping, booking restaurants and travel, they may not need to open apps like Uber, Amazon, OpenTable or Airbnb as much.

Any major app would be reluctant to let “Apple rewrite and come up with a different user flow” for how consumers interact with their service, Kittlaus said.

It’s not a new conundrum: Apple and Google have a history of integrating the functions of third-party apps into their operating systems.

Apple said during its iPhone launch event last week that Siri AI already works with more than 300,000 apps, though that likely accounts for just a slice of the apps available in the App Store. The App Store had more than 2 million apps a decade ago , according to the company.

“There (are) some frictions with people moving away from each homegrown brand’s website and using agents to do that for them,” Kittlaus said.

Kittlaus said he quit Apple when Steve Jobs died, because he was concerned the vision he shared with Jobs wasn’t well understood by the company’s management. Fifteen years since Siri’s launch on the iPhone 4S, his outlook for AI assistants remains the same.

“That vision hasn’t changed one iota,” he said. “But nobody’s done it yet.”

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Dag Kittlaus 和 Adam Cheyer 因创建了一款如今已在数十亿台苹果设备中使用的助手而闻名，他们长期以来一直在思考搜索引擎之后会发生什么。

2007年，他们与汤姆·格鲁伯共同创立了一家初创公司，其产品概念源于两人在斯坦福研究所开发的一个概念。他们将这款产品命名为Siri，目标是打造一个“行动引擎”。

“我们过去常说，‘如果你想查找网页，就去谷歌之类的搜索引擎，’”切耶尔8月份接受CNN采访时说。“‘如果你想完成某件事，就去使用‘行动引擎’：比如Siri。’”

据当时的报道，自从苹果公司以超过 2 亿美元的价格收购苹果公司以来，Siri 一直是 iPhone 的主要功能之一，并在 2011 年的 iPhone 4S 上首次推出。但大多数用户仅将 Siri 用于设置闹钟或播放音乐等简单任务。

这家科技巨头希望这种情况在周一发生改变，届时它将开始推出全新的 Siri，作为其新的 iOS 27 软件的一部分。

苹果公司表示，Siri 已针对人工智能时代进行了重建。新的 Siri AI 可以分析 iPhone 屏幕上的内容，操作应用程序，并在回复中利用来自日历、信息和其他 iPhone 应用的信息。苹果希望这些功能能够使其在与 OpenAI 的 ChatGPT 和谷歌的 Gemini 等竞争对手的较量中占据优势。

Kittlaus 和 Cheyer 已不再参与 Siri 的开发，并在 Siri 被收购后不久离开了苹果公司。他们一致认为，苹果庞大的应用商店、iPhone 和 Apple Watch 等产品的普及以及该公司对消费者隐私的重视，可能会使这款新的 AI 助手在竞争中占据优势。

包括苹果在内的大型科技公司十多年来一直致力于开发能够为消费者处理各种任务的人工智能助手。但要实现这一目标，人工智能助手必须像人类一样理解语音，并能与消费者日常使用的应用程序无缝协作，同时又不损害用户隐私。

“全世界都在追求这种愿景，”切耶尔告诉 CNN。

苹果公司因在人工智能领域落后而受到批评，一直备受关注。

新版 Siri 的发布距离 ChatGPT 首次推出已近四年。与此同时，谷歌和三星已将人工智能工具融入到安卓系统的界面中，例如分析和搜索屏幕上显示的内容，并根据用户在手机上的操作提供建议。

Kittlaus 曾在 2010 年和 2011 年苹果公司工作，当时苹果收购了 Siri。他表示，苹果通常会优先考虑自己的产品，可能最初并没有意识到人工智能的转变。

“我认为这只是苹果公司一贯的运作方式，他们非常专注于下一代产品的发布，”基特劳斯说。

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苹果公司去年推迟了改版后的 Siri 的发布，因为它表示需要更多时间来实现原定于 2024 年推出的功能。

Kittlaus 和 Cheyer 都表示，他们认为苹果公司目前处于有利地位，能够使 Siri 更接近其最初的“行动引擎”愿景。能够利用苹果设备中的信息来回答个人问题——而不仅仅是人们可能在网上搜索的常识性问题——可能会使苹果公司脱颖而出。

CNN 测试 Siri AI 的测试版时，这款助手通过“信息”应用中的确认短信找到了即将到来的牙医预约。它还调出了朋友在短信中推荐的乐队的更多详情，并将 Instagram 上的一份卷心菜沙拉食谱发送到 Siri 应用，以便我稍后需要时查看。

拥有安卓操作系统以及 Gmail 和谷歌地图等热门应用的谷歌也拥有类似的优势。

但苹果公司押注于其对隐私的重视，认为这将使消费者更愿意信任Siri。苹果使用名为“私有云计算”的系统来处理那些过于复杂而无法在本地处理的AI任务；该系统仅将与特定任务相关的数据发送到苹果的服务器。由于苹果的部分AI功能使用了Gemini，因此它也将该系统扩展到了谷歌云。

Siri 和其他人工智能助手面临的下一个主要障碍可能是科技行业的商业模式。

过去，技术上的障碍使得虚拟助手的功能仅限于设置闹钟、播放音乐或管理智能家居设备。像 Siri、亚马逊 Alexa 和 Google Assistant 这样的 AI 助手，除非问题以特定方式提出，否则往往难以理解用户意图或回答问题。而且，使用 AI 助手订购披萨或通过 Uber 叫车，用户需要手动将其连接到应用程序。在很多情况下，自己动手反而更方便。

但过去十年间，很多事情都发生了变化。

大型语言模型让AI助手更容易理解复杂的指令，执行多步骤任务，并在不同应用间进行交互。苹果和其他科技巨头正致力于打造一个用户无需打开应用，只需向AI发出指令即可处理各种事务的未来。

Kittlaus 和 Cheyer 认为，这可能会给开发这些应用程序的公司带来很大的担忧。如果用户依赖 Siri、Gemini 或 ChatGPT 来购物、预订餐厅和旅行，他们可能就不需要经常打开 Uber、亚马逊、OpenTable 或 Airbnb 等应用程序了。

Kittlaus表示，任何大型应用程序都不愿意让“苹果公司重写并提出不同的用户流程”来改变消费者与其服务互动的方式。

这并非什么新难题：苹果和谷歌都有将第三方应用程序的功能集成到其操作系统中的先例。

苹果公司在上周的iPhone发布会上表示，Siri AI已经可以与超过30万个应用程序配合使用，但这可能只是App Store中应用程序总数的一小部分。据该公司称，十年前App Store的应用程序数量超过200万个。

Kittlaus表示：“人们不再使用各自本土品牌的网站，而是通过代理商来做这件事，这其中存在一些摩擦。”

基特劳斯表示，史蒂夫·乔布斯去世后，他便离开了苹果公司，因为他担心公司管理层没有充分理解他与乔布斯共同的愿景。自Siri在iPhone 4S上发布以来，已经过去了15年，但他对人工智能助手的看法依然如故。

“那个愿景丝毫未变，”他说。“但至今还没有人实现它。”