The tech world is now gushing over a different kind of virtual assistant: chatbots. The technology has largely remained stagnant, and the talking assistants have become the butt of jokes, including in a 2018 “ Saturday Night Live” sketch featuring a smart speaker for seniors. Since then, people have been far from blown away by Siri and competing assistants that are powered by artificial intelligence, like Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant. field for a long time, and this still blows me away,” Mr.

At his request, Siri checked the time in Paris (“8:16 p.m.,” Siri replied), defined the word “mitosis” (“Cell division in which the nucleus divides into nuclei containing the same number of chromosomes,” it said) and pulled up a list of 14 highly rated Greek restaurants, five of them in Palo Alto, Calif. Scott Forstall, then Apple’s head of software, pushed an iPhone button to summon Siri and prodded it with questions. The phone, which looked identical to the previous version, had a new feature that the audience was soon buzzing about: Siri, a virtual assistant. On a rainy Tuesday in San Francisco, Apple executives took the stage in a crowded auditorium to unveil the fifth-generation iPhone.

Intel assistant