Will AI Save or Kill Siri and Alexa?

Once upon a time, the biggest prestige battle in Silicon Valley was who had the best voice assistant. Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, and to a lesser extent Google's less-imaginatively-named Google Assistant cemented themselves as the dominant players. But they all struggled to bring in revenue, and then got left in the dust when generative AI exploded onto the scene in late 2022. Now though, Big Tech companies seem to be gearing up to hit refresh on their voice assistants, so the question is: Will generative AI revitalize them, or will it be the final nail in their coffin?

Alexa, Define AI for Me

To be clear, voice assistants à la Siri and Alexa do use a degree of AI programming. But when it comes to interpreting what you're telling them, they're not fantastically AI-ified. Traditional voice assistants are trained to transmit your voice into a command and then either follow it or respond that they don't understand or can't complete the given task. They're missing ChatGPT's ability to riff, however nonsensically.

AI chatbots like ChatGPT have lots of potential to start yakking and set themselves up as major competitors to traditional voice assistants. "Adding voice capabilities to existing AI models with established user bases, like Claude, Bard, and Grok, etc., isn't a major leap," Mia Kotalik, a software developer, told The Daily Upside. "These models could easily add a voice component and emerge as strong competitors in the voice assistant market." She pointed out that OpenAI's desktop app has already integrated a voice assistant feature. Other Big Tech big guns may also join the fray; a patent from Meta suggests it too is working on a generative AI voice assistant.

Hey Google, What's the Good News?

Where the older generation of voice assistants have an edge, however, is that they're in our pockets and our homes, embedded in devices that millions of people already own — if generative AI can be successfully weaved into their makeup, they have a head start. "Apple, in particular, is uniquely positioned to capitalize on this advantage with its integration of on-device AI," Dev Nag, CEO at AI software startup QueryPal, told The Daily Upside. "The ubiquity of smartphones means these AI assistants are with users 24/7, both inside and outside the home, accumulating vast amounts of contextual data and user behaviors." Apple's ecosystem of apps and devices means its assistant could amass a huge amount of data, right down to customer heartbeat and sleep patterns. 

Nag sees Alexa facing a bigger challenge: "For stationary assistants like most Alexa devices, this means finding ways to compensate for their limited mobility, perhaps by offering superior home automation and entertainment integration. However, they could struggle to match the personalized, always-available experience of mobile assistants."

We know this is a road Big Tech has already started down:

• Apple, while slow to initially dip a toe into the generative AI trend, has announced it will partner with OpenAI to bring AI software called Apple Intelligence to its devices and Siri in particular.
• Amazon has said it will be integrating Claude — the generative AI chatbot made by Anthropic, in which it is a major investor — into Alexa.

But will generative AI noticeably improve the Siris and Alexas out there, and will it change how people use them? Generative AI voice assistants could potentially hoover up a lot more of your data to personalize their responses to you, get a lot more conversational in tone, or be able to interpret your commands and respond in a more sophisticated way. "Essentially, voice assistants will serve as a user-friendly gateway to increasingly powerful AI systems," Paul Ferguson, founder of Clearlead AI Consulting, told The Daily Upside. "They'll make advanced technology accessible through natural voice interactions, potentially opening up new use cases we haven't even thought of yet," he said, adding he expects to see new players enter the voice assistant space built from the ground up.

Siri, Show Me the Money

There's just one teeny, tiny speed bump for the Big Tech companies that are pinning their hopes on generative AI to breathe life back into their assistants — and no, it's not getting thousands of contractors to secretly listen to recordings of users. Get with the times — that was so 2019. 

It's very simple: Voice assistants have historically been money-losers. The Wall Street Journal reported in July that Amazon's Echo smart speaker, the keystone in its Alexa strategy, hasn't come close to paying off. The idea was that even if the company sold the Echo at a loss, it would lead consumers into an Amazon ecosystem where they'd make other purchases through Alexa, but it hasn't panned out that way. According to documents seen by the WSJ, the Echo along with other bits of hardware like the Kindle and Fire Stick have lost the company tens of billions of dollars.

The thing about generative AI is it's not cheap: Just ask Canva, the peppy design software company that recently raised its subscription fees 300% after adding a suite of AI tools. So integrating it into voice assistants will put a favorable bottom line even further out of reach unless Big Tech companies come up with new ways to monetize. And, to be fair, it sounds like they're already alive to that issue: Amazon's new AI assistant, dubbed "Remarkable Alexa," is due to debut next month, and Reuters reported in June that Amazon is planning on charging users $5 to $10 per month to get access to the souped-up version of Alexa. "Even if adoption is modest, it could still generate meaningful revenue to help offset Alexa's historical losses," Ferguson said.

There's no indication yet that Apple or Google might follow suit, but neither are strangers to subscription economics. Perhaps one day soon Siri, like your therapist or your lawyer, could start charging by the hour.