Leaked Apple Meeting Shows How Dire the Siri Situation Really Is (theverge.com) 40
A leaked Apple meeting reveals significant internal struggles with Siri's development, as AI-powered features announced last June have been delayed and may not make it into iOS 19. The Verge reports: Bloomberg (paywalled) has the full scoop on what happened at a Siri team meeting led by senior director Robby Walker, who oversees the division. He called the delay an "ugly" situation and sympathized with employees who might be feeling burned out or frustrated by Apple's decisions and Siri's still-lackluster reputation. He also said it's not a given that the missing Siri features will make it into iOS 19 this year; that's the company's current target, but "doesn't mean that we're shipping then," he told employees. "We have other commitments across Apple to other projects," Walker said, according to Bloomberg's report. "We want to keep our commitments to those, and we understand those are now potentially more timeline-urgent than the features that have been deferred."
The meeting also hinted at tension between Apple's Siri unit and the marketing division. Walker said the communications team wanted to highlight features like Siri understanding personal context and being able to take action based on what's currently on a user's screen -- even though they were nowhere near ready. Those WWDC teases and the resulting customer expectations only made matters worse, Walker acknowledged. Apple has since pulled an iPhone 16 ad that showcased the features and has added disclaimers to several areas of its website noting they've all been punted to a TBD date. They were held back in part due to quality issues "that resulted in them not working properly up to a third of the time," according to Mark Gurman.
[...] Walker told his staff that senior executives like software chief Craig Federighi and AI boss John Giannandrea are taking "intense personal accountability" for a predicament that's drawing fierce criticism as the months pass by with little to show for it beyond a prettier Siri animation. "Customers are not expecting only these new features but they also want a more fully rounded-out Siri," Walker said. "We're going to ship these features and more as soon as they are ready." He praised the team for its "incredibly impressive" work so far. "These are not quite ready to go to the general public, even though our competitors might have launched them in this state or worse," he said of the delayed features.
The meeting also hinted at tension between Apple's Siri unit and the marketing division. Walker said the communications team wanted to highlight features like Siri understanding personal context and being able to take action based on what's currently on a user's screen -- even though they were nowhere near ready. Those WWDC teases and the resulting customer expectations only made matters worse, Walker acknowledged. Apple has since pulled an iPhone 16 ad that showcased the features and has added disclaimers to several areas of its website noting they've all been punted to a TBD date. They were held back in part due to quality issues "that resulted in them not working properly up to a third of the time," according to Mark Gurman.
[...] Walker told his staff that senior executives like software chief Craig Federighi and AI boss John Giannandrea are taking "intense personal accountability" for a predicament that's drawing fierce criticism as the months pass by with little to show for it beyond a prettier Siri animation. "Customers are not expecting only these new features but they also want a more fully rounded-out Siri," Walker said. "We're going to ship these features and more as soon as they are ready." He praised the team for its "incredibly impressive" work so far. "These are not quite ready to go to the general public, even though our competitors might have launched them in this state or worse," he said of the delayed features.
What if America's Tech Platforms are hiding... (Score:4, Interesting)
The media had spent years promoting Amazon's claims about their brand new, fully automated retail operations and then the media realized it was actually powered by 1,000 Indian workers. They were watching the video and manually entering the purchases for items they saw customers pick up on camera from the other side of the world. Folks were 100% sure that Amazon had some novel new tech but all they really had was access to a very cheap source of foreign labor and some webcams
What if Big Tech is actually hiding many examples of this? That the biggest tech companies in the world are still hiding the fact that large portions of their functionality is being generated by cheap foreign labor in countries that we're now in a trade-war with..
I've been using an iphone since the 3gs and I remember when Siri rolled out. It was pretty darn useful. It was good with dictation and answering simple questions. Right now, after an AI boom, this same software is less effective at the exact same exact functionality. In my opinion, the only way this makes sense is there's some hidden resource powering these services that isn't reflected in the software and that this resource is getting harder or more expensive to acquire and hide.
The liquor industry knows where it's liquor is coming from. The automobile industry knows where cars are made. But a lotta folks working in American Tech are reliant on foreign labor without actually knowing it. American Tech can't adapt to this trade war if they have aren't even aware that their supply chain crosses through those countries?
Re:What if America's Tech Platforms are hiding... (Score:5, Insightful)
You post intriguing ideas.
But on your point, "Right now, after an AI boom, this same software is less effective at the exact same exact functionality." - the old adage applies, never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.
To me, it all looks like the companies are just wearing the emperor's new clothes as the follow the pied piper to jump on the bandwagon full of lemmings - to put AI onto anything. What better way to nail AI onto a product than onto those you already make.
Imagine somebody invented a "better" wheel. It's octagonal. Cheaper to manufacture. Looks cool, feng shui factor. Everybody will want on, it's so now. You, yes you, need one, don't miss out. Bumpy ride - love it, it's part of the experience.
These companies seem so desperate to find a way to shovel AI onto the market by tacking it onto conventional products or paradigms, that existing products that worked well are now shackled down and hamstrung with this non-fit non-integrated afterthought burden.
They are so afraid of losing out to the competition. If I were one of them, I would bide my time and save my money, wait for the majority to fail and bail, learn from that what might actually be useful, then spend my money wisely on a product that meets proven market needs.
AI is a mystical thing operating in an otherworldly plane where it powers itself by sucking out real intelligence from once smart people.
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They are so afraid of losing out to the competition. If I were one of them, I would bide my time and save my money, wait for the majority to fail and bail, learn from that what might actually be useful, then spend my money wisely on a product that meets proven market needs.
You're completely correct on this assessment. Ironically, this is pretty much exactly what Apple did back in 2000.
MP3 players existed years before the iPod. The Diamond Rio, Creative Nomad, iJam, and RCA Lyra were just a few examples of such players. Apple wasn't first to market with the iPod, and even when they did release it, it was to the much-smaller Mac userbase.
But the appeal of the iPod was as much based on iTunes as the player itself. iTunes was a vast improvement over Creative's NoMad Explorer and
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Actually Amazon's "just walk out shopping" works fine in the small Amazon Go stores, and it really is a fully automated system. The problems came when they attempted to scale up to grocery store size. The Indian contractors were brought in to sanity-check the automated system, they found that the system "mostly" worked adequately without them. Unfortunately customers are not going to be content with a bill that's "mostly" correct, and though even with the Indian contractors they were saving money on cash
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That is a fundamental problem though with a lot of the applications for AI and ML. It is mostly correct. Except the places we'd most like to deploy it because it would realize a lot of savings are places where mostly correct either isn't good enough, "it mostly avoids collisions except when it drives right into the side of box truck" or "most of the time this grocery ticket is right, but this time it isnt so fix it".
The problem is now you need someone who can; return the incorrectly identified item to inve
Good for them (Score:3)
Not releasing something which doesn't work as intended until it's ready. Unlike Microsoft which seems to be their mantra.
I just read a story (not the one I'm linking to) about Steve Jobs' reaction to Apple's launch of MobilMe. In short, it was a disaster. After firing off an email to the team [cultofmac.com], he gathered everyone for a meeting which went something like this:
The tone of the email, which delivered an honest appraisal of the service’s failures, differed wildly from the tongue-lashing Jobs gave to those responsible for the MobileMe disaster. After gathering employees in the Apple auditorium, Jobs asked them, “Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?”
When a few bold individuals began to answer him, Jobs snapped: “So why the f**k doesn’t it do that?”
He spent the next hour berating the group. He scolded them for tarnishing Apple’s reputation. And he told them they “should hate each other for having let each other down.”
He then fired the head of the team, replacing him with Eddy Cue.
Call him a dick (which he was), call him a narcissist, call him a charlatan. What you can't call him is not devoted to getting things right. As he said, the failure of MobilMe tarnished Apple's reputation. It let their customers down. Perhaps this delay in launching Siri is Apple's way of not having a second MobilMe situation.
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I dunno. This last statement reads like something that was intended to "leak". That makes me think this whole story is PR, and Apple is actually still trying to let PR handle the mess instead of someone high up making a more public apology. And, quite frankly, they really should just publicly apologize, since this is a bigger failure than Apple
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I also am expecting a class action suit from iPhone 16 buyers any day now.
Over siri?
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Specifically from all the people who (at least will claim to have) bought the iPhone 16 specifically because of the Apple Intelligence promises.
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Just the name "apple intelligence" screams gimmick. If anything I'd be more likely to sue over the unpatchable hardware vulnerability baked into the USB port.
Re: Good for them (Score:2)
Good for you. People were still fooled into buying an incomplete product. They are owed recourse, would you agree?
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My wife uses it.
One time she asked it for directions to a hair shop. Siri responded, "but I like your hair the way it is."
Fuck that. Turn that shit off.
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The dildo? It's part of my DEI initiative.
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Same way I know I will never suck someone's dick.
Some stuff is just so clear that 100% confidence is warranted.
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I have zero interest in Siri. Never have. Never will. I see zero utility in it, or any of the promised features and could not POSSIBLY care less about them. First thing I do on an Apple device is turn Siri off.
I use it heavily for two things: navigation, and setting cooking timers. Both are applications where I either don't want to be distracted by touching the phone or need to avoid touching it with greasy hands. And yes, you can now turn a timer off with Siri.
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Jobs wasn't a "designer, developer or innovator" either, he was simply one of the most talented marketing geniuses of his generation. Edward Bernays would have been in awe of his ability to get people to pay premium prices for a crippled OS on substandard hardware capable of running less than five percent of the programs or peripherals available, and then get them to sleep in line to buy the next new piece of shiny offered. I'm still amazed at the fanboi fanaticism.
Re:Good for them (Score:4, Interesting)
What does Steve Jobs have to do with this? You know he's dead, right? And Apple is now run by a corporate raider and private-equity hatchet man? Tim Cook isn't a designer, developer or innovator.
He's also not a private-equity hatchet man or a corporate raider.
Tim Cook ran Apple's operations for a really long time before Steve passed away. Nobody, and I mean nobody at Apple knows more about how stuff gets made at Apple than Tim. He made lots of parts of Apple a lot more efficient.
But you're right that he isn't a designer, or a developer. He keeps the company running. And Apple is missing that spark lately. The folks who had that spark have mostly left, probably at least in part because they kept butting heads and didn't have Steve keeping them talking to each other, and what's left is a very well functioning company that struggles to come up with anything new and innovative that actually is worth buying.
Parts of the company have forgotten Steve's whole "cannibalize your own products" mantra and keep playing it safe. Other parts have swung too far in the other direction and keep enshittifying macOS to make it more like iOS. But for the most part, the company is still basically running, and isn't being gutted as you insinuate, at least from what I can tell.
Apple no longer has designers or engineers at the helm so your story about Jobs just doesn't apply. And I'm sorry but "not releasing something til it's ready" isn't what they're talking about here. Siri has actually become less and less effective since it's launch. Everyone wanted it to accomplish a few very simple features and within a couple years of launch Siri nailed those features.
They bought a finished product instead of developing it from scratch, and then they couldn't make it better, probably because the people who developed it got immediately wealthy and then probably left as soon as their contractually obligated employment periods ended. :-D
But for some ridiculous reason, after years of media reports of massive innovations in the field of AI, Apple's digital assistant seems more confused and hallucinatory than ever.
The same seems to be true for all AI-based assistants. Could it be that AI is the wrong approach, and that what you really need are actual engineers figuring out what things the assistant should do, how you should ask it to do those things, and then building up a reasonable library of scripts that do it?
I believe Apple was using some form of human labor to augment Siri's abilities in hopes that they could "fake it till they made it" like tech grifters are known to do. But none of those innovations ever actually materialized and since the trade war is heating up, it's getting harder for them to conscript and hide the foreign labor they need to make it work. So Apple went from a fake, human-powered Siri that actually worked, to a fully automated Siri that doesn't work.
A lot of Siri happens on-device. Is it possible that some of the queries that don't stay on-device get human assistance? Maybe, but really unlikely. People aren't fast enough, realistically.
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And Apple actually got caught using human within th
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Is your Microsoft comment based on something that actually happened, or just your prejudice against "PC guys"?
When it comes to AI specifically, Microsoft began investing in OpenAI 10 years ago. Copilot is among the best, most mature AI systems out there. It's certainly miles ahead of "Apple Intelligence."
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Not releasing something which doesn't work as intended until it's ready. Unlike Microsoft which seems to be their mantra.
Vision pro was all apple.
What you can't call him is not devoted to getting things right.
And remember, mobileme actually launched to the market. When the apple 2 was the only thing keeping their company afloat, he kept shitting on it internally while he was working on Lisa, which was a total shit show. He only worked on Macintosh when basically forced to do so, and years before that was even out he still kept shitting on the company's only money maker. And that money maker was not of his design, which is probably why he hated it so much.
Calling him a dick is an understa
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It's insane how many happily brown nose his rotting anus.
I see a similar pattern with Musk, Trump, maybe Thiel. What is it with people and this BS misplaced hero worship?
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Elmo and Thiel, yet, la Presidenta NO!. He doesn't have the ability to manage anything. That's why the billionaires and pols surrounding him, like him. He's an easy mark and they can get him to do anything....it's easy, pat him on the head, tell him what a good boy he is, and dangle throw money on the ground for him to grovel in.
They don't have the talent (Score:1)
I thought Apple was going to wait until AI is more mature. The comment about it failing a third of the time means they are not using deterministic type of ai, which seems strange to me.
Reminds me of Shortcuts/Workflow which is constantly breaking, undocumented and nonfunctional.
Too Much LSD In The Code (Score:1)
Dat shit be trippin', man.
Translation ChatGPT failed (Score:2, Troll)
Dire, you say? I say Siri-ous... (Score:3)
Everyone's in such a rush to put AI in everything, whether it's ready or not.
Sure, go ahead. Just *please* give me a setting to turn it off for each thing you're trying to do. Even if that only sticks for a month at a time before it resets, it'd be worth it...
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Everyone's in such a rush to put AI in everything, whether it's ready or not.
Or even if people want it or it.
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Well, they can't even get auto-correct to work (Score:5, Insightful)
Mixed systems guy here. My regular phone is a pixel, but I got an iPad because of a killer app that I don't need anymore. So the iPad became my not-at-a-computer-browser. Trying to post comments is unbelievably bad. If I type a wrong character and backspace, AC ignores the backspace and thinks I typed something different. You have to make special effort for it not to correct something you typed correctly after the backspace. What a sloppy POS feature.
I got a Pixel tablet, and it is just darn near perfect with AutoCorrect. Still playing with the AI, but pretty good so far.
Apple relies so much on reputation and being the "cool" thing to have. They are letting the marketing department get to far ahead of development and they are writing checks they can't cash. This won't gain them points when the features arrive as it will be old news by the ("Finely! What took them so long!). Steve Jobs understood that it was better to keep quiet and wait until it was well refined, then demo the hell out of and create an emotional reaction that would drive sales.
Monopoly rents corrupt (Score:2)
Leaked? (Score:3)
Sounds more like this is a cleverly created PR piece that was supposed to be "leaked". "Oh good on Apple for having their customer's best interests at heart." Sorry, I just don't trust anything I read about these big tech companies any longer.
Someone at Apple bought into the false AI prophecy (Score:2)
One day they will maybe get it right.
Oblig... (Score:2)
experimental mode for siri? (Score:2)
Is there some experimental mode for Siri that can utilize an AI model? Despite the higher error rate I would expect that the LLM is going to give more interesting (engaging) results for certain types of interactions.
Tantalizing tease (Score:2)
AI is a tantalizing tease. You can see glimpses of what it can potentially do, but then it hallucinates and produces something beyond useless and potentially dangerous.
As a software developer using AI, it's clear to me when AI produces garbage or something not viable, and I'll ignore what it suggested or if I'm prompting I'll steer it in the right direction. But I'm using 35 years of experience to filter out the garbage it produces. It can speed up what I do, generally by saving me some time digging through