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Voice assistants hold so much promise, but in more than a decade since Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa first entered our lives, their most compelling use is still setting timers. Competition from Google Assistant (and, if we’re being charitable, Samsung’s Bixby) has failed to spark innovation in this space, and in many ways voice control has waned. These assistants regularly misunderstand, don’t understand, and sometimes just don’t listen at all. They are a far cry from the proactive, actually intelligent digital assistants they were originally made out to be.

Enter generative AI: technology voice assistants must transform them from novelty to necessity. This week at its Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple announced plans to infuse its long-neglected assistant with emerging technology, giving Siri two key skills: context and conversation. This is the recipe for fulfilling the original promise, or at least bringing us closer together.

Apple says its Apple Intelligence will bring Siri “whole new superpowers,” gathered from improved language understanding, awareness of personal context, and the ability to take actions in your phone’s apps.

Where the current Siri needs explicit instructions on what to do and how to do it, Apple promises that this new version will let you say something like, “Siri, what time does mom’s flight land?” and the assistant will know to look through your mail and messages and extract the information. Then you can say, “How long will it take me to get there?” and it should know you mean the airport and pull up a route and ETA via Maps.

You also won’t have to word the commands exactly. Instead of saying “Siri, set a timer for 10 minutes,” you should be able to get around with a phrase like “Siri, set an alarm for — oh wait, no, set a timer for 10 minutes. Actually, make that 5” and the assistant will be fine.

These seemingly minor improvements address some of the fundamental problems of voice assistants—they don’t understand enough about you and require you to speak in unnaturally precise ways to get them to do anything—which has turned these promising pieces of technology into little more than glorified alarm clocks.

Siri, Alexa, and more. are already artificially intelligent voice assistants: machines that mimic human intelligence through a combination of command-and-response programming and machine learning. But with the power of generative AI and LLM, voice assistants can have the ability to generate a response based on what they’ve learned, rather than simply reacting with existing knowledge.

That should provide the tools to create that more conversational, smarter voice assistant — one that promises to be far more useful than the ones we have today. But all we’ve seen so far are demonstrations of this potential, none of it exists in real life yet.

That’s because creating a super-intelligent voice assistant is a huge challenge with equally big potential consequences if it goes wrong. It’s also not as simple as giving Siri and Alexa a ChatGPT-style lobotomy.

Voice assistants, especially those connected to devices and services in our phones and homes, are a different beast than a chatbot in a browser. They have the ability to take action in the real world: to do things like control our thermostats and lights and send emails and messages. This is not where you want a potentially hallucinatory AI in control, and it speaks to why Apple has carefully integrated its ChatGPT integration with Siri.

Amazon is also working on a new and improved voice assistant, and while the company says it has already integrated its generative AI into Alexa components, according to a report from Wealththe new Alexa isn’t even ready.

The company announced an “all-new, smarter, more conversational Alexa” powered by a new Alexa LLM last fall with an impressive demo. It touts Alexa, which should understand spoken phrases for more human interactions, interpret context more effectively, and perform multiple requests from a single command — like “Alexa, call mom, turn on the living room lights, and lock the front door.”

But since then, we haven’t seen any sign of this super-powerful Alexa, only vague assurances that it’s in a limited preview. This may be because according to Wealththe company is struggling to merge the old Alexa and its capabilities with its vision of a next-generation voice assistant.

Similarly, Apple is taking a slow and steady approach. The new Siri won’t launch until the fall, and even then it’ll be labeled a beta. Initially, it won’t have a place in the smart home either: it’s not supported by any of Apple’s home voice devices, such as the HomePod and Apple TV smart speakers. It’s also not coming to the Apple Watch yet.

While these devices probably don’t have enough processing power to drive generative models, many of which Apple wants to run locally for privacy purposes, this feels like a big gap. The smart home is a key space for a smarter voice assistant, not only can it help connect the personal and home space, but it can help make the management of a smart home much easier.

Amazon’s former head of devices and services, Dave Limp, told me last year that the new Alexa LLM they were building was trained on hundreds of smart home APIs. This can give Alexa the context it needs to proactively control smart home devices like lights, locks, thermostats, and the like, making them easier to set up and use, and allowing you to give commands like “Alexa, it’s dark in here and I I’m cold’ and the voice assistant will know what to do.

Unlike Apple, Amazon said its new Alexa will appear in all of its Echo smart speakers, including the first Echo that launched in 2014. (It can do this by offloading processing to the cloud.) Although, since the HomePod The Mini is already four years old, I guess we’ll see a new model with updated hardware designed for AI very soon. Apple can no longer afford to cede the home to Alexa.

While the stage is set for the second coming of the voice assistant, there’s still a long way to go until we see Act 1. It’s also possible that the show will start with some entirely new characters if these companies can’t find a way to effectively build the new technology on top of the foundations. the old one.

This seems to be the path Google is taking. Its Google Assistant voice assistant has yet to undergo a major AI overhaul, with the company reportedly putting all its resources into the new AI-powered Gemini assistant. While the symbiosis there seems like a natural move given Google’s penchant for abandoning the old, it’s entirely possible that the company could launch an entirely new voice assistant built from scratch on top of generative AI.

However they get there, the promise of these intelligent voice assistants is exciting, especially for any company that can effectively merge the personal assistant with the home. Imagine if your HomePod could welcome you home with personalized updates, tell you you need to leave for your daughter’s school play 15 minutes early because of traffic, and charge your electric car with enough range to get to there until you go out the door. It’s much more like what we were promised – and it’s much smarter than setting a timer.