It's high time that Siri grew up

My first encounter with Siri was back in 2011, when Apple's voice-activated artificial intelligence was released.

I was completing university; the BlackBerry was still popular and I was one of a handful in my class with the new iPhone that had the robot assistant built in.

The technology was pretty basic at the time: it struggled with some accents and the commands it could respond to were fairly limited. Back then, Siri was something of a novelty, rather than genuinely useful.

Six years later, BlackBerry is all but gone and the iPhone reigns, but what hasn't changed is Siri's novelty feel. Its voice recognition has improved dramatically (I suspect even the thickest regional accent wouldn't trip it up), and Apple has added many new features, but I doubt most iPhone users take advantage of it regularly. Some processes, such as setting an alarm, are quicker to ask Siri to do than rifling through the settings to find, but I still use it rarely.

This hasn't been much of a problem for Apple. Its smartphone is still the world's most popular and it is selling them in near-record quantities. The voice assistant on Android, the rival operating system, is hardly a smash hit either.

But there's a nagging feeling that Apple is falling a little behind the curve. Smartphones have proved to be perfectly capable without voice assistants, but the next wave of technology might not be. In 2014 Amazon launched its Echo speaker, a voice-controlled hi-fi powered by a Siri-style artificial intelligence called Alexa. Google followed it last year with a rival device, the Google Home.

AI assistants are an afterthought on mobile phones, but are central to "smart speakers", which are static, typically sitting on a kitchen table or bookshelf, and do not include a touchscreen. Analysts see them as an intriguing new category. While they may not sell in iPhone-sized numbers, they have become a fixture in many people's lives, and have generated enough of a buzz to rattle the established smartphone giants.

Tonight, at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose, Apple is rumoured to follow with a rival "Siri speaker".

It's a case of catch-up for Apple, almost three years after Amazon's Echo debuted. That's hardly unusual - Apple's smartwatch followed efforts from Samsung and others, and outdid them - but it is also a rare defensive move. As iPhone growth has stalled, Apple has emphasised its services business, made up of divisions such as the Apple Music streaming service. Apple Music's main competitor, Spotify, is a fixture on Google Home and Amazon Echo; Apple Music is absent.

Without its own speaker product, Apple is not just missing out on a potentially lucrative new category, it is weakening its own ecosystem. Famously reluctant about allowing its services on other hardware, it is obliged to create its own.

How successful it will be is another matter. Siri is seen by critics as a clear third place behind Amazon and Google's artificial intelligence systems. Apple's commitment to privacy means it has to work harder to keep up with rivals that are a little more blasé about crunching personal data when developing AI systems.

This may not matter at present. In truth, the "intelligence" of existing smart speakers is limited - they are mainly used for simple tasks like setting alarms, playing internet radio stations and turning on smart home gadgets. Apple has unmatched consumer cachet, as well as the considerable pull of its "ecosystem" of gadgets working together, to its advantage.

But they are expected to become more central to our lives as their power grows. Amazon is working to put its Alexa assistant in dozens of other gadgets, from smart fridges to televisions. Google is putting them in every Android phone.

Tonight, when Apple makes its own AI the star of the show, it will have to show that Siri has grown up.

- ©The Daily Telegraph