Like Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant have lost the race to artificial intelligence

On a rainy Tuesday in San Francisco, Apple executives took the stage to a packed auditorium to unveil the fifth-generation iPhone. The phone, which looked identical to the previous version, had a new feature that the public was quick to comment: Siri, a virtual assistant. Scott Forstall, then Apple's chief software officer, pressed a button on the iPhone to call Siri and asked questions. At his request, Siri checked the time in Paris ("20:16," Siri replied), defined the word "mitosis" ("Cell division in which the nucleus is divided into nuclei containing the same number of chromosomes," he said) and has published a list of 14 Greek restaurants highly regarded, five of them in Palo Alto, California. "I've been in the field of artificial intelligence for a long time and it continues to amaze me," Forstall says.