Chatbots are powered by… large language models… systems trained to recognize and generate text based on enormous data sets scraped off the web….
In contrast, Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant are essentially what are known as command-and-control systems. These can understand a finite list of questions and requests like “What’s the weather in New York City?” or “Turn on the bedroom lights.” If a user asks the virtual assistant to do something that is not in its code, the bot simply says it can’t help….
Siri’s database contains a gigantic list of words, including the names of musical artists and locations like restaurants, in nearly two dozen languages…. [S]eemingly simple updates, like adding some new phrases to the data set, would require rebuilding the entire database, which could take up to six weeks…