Apple is reportedly already looking at whether new A.I. chatbots like ChatGPT can lead it towards a replacement for the ailing Siri.

A new report claims that Apple continues to struggle with Siri's limitations, thanks in part to the way it was created initially and has yet to be retooled to make it easier for Apple's engineers to help it grow beyond the problematic experience it can be for users today.

The New York Times reports that Apple is dealing with Siri's "cumbersome design" that makes it difficult to add new features and expand upon existing ones. A former Apple engineer says that they were given the task of working on Siri in 2014, only to find a database that "contains a gigantic list of words, including the names of musical artists and locations like restaurants, in nearly two dozen languages."

The engineer liked the database to "one big snowball" that would grow every time a new word was added to the database. This meant that adding new phrases to Siri's database could take weeks while rebuilding the entire database would then take up to six weeks to complete. Adding new search tools made matters worse - that would take almost a year, the engineer says.

But Apple is already working on what comes next. The company held its annual A.I. summit in February 2023, an internal event that shows employees what Apple is going to work on and gives them chance to learn as well. This year's event saw ChatGPT become the star of the show. Two employees told the NYT that the Siri team was among others that tested ChatGPT and other so-called large language model A.I. tools. "Many engineers, including members of the Siri team, have been testing language-generating concepts every week," the people reportedly said.

While ChatGPT is far from perfect, its ability to hold what feels like a conversation and respond in ways people expect is what makes it appear lightyears ahead of Siri, Amazon's Alexa, and Google's Assistant. Whether Apple can build something similar into an iPhone remains to be seen, but it's clear that not only is Apple aware of Siri's limitations but it's also working to go around them, too.