Apple Acknowledges Siri Leadership Has Officially Moved From Eddy Cue to Craig Federighi

[MH01]

The glue that holds it together? Exceptionally talented?

So you missed the obvious , that ringo is perceived as the least talented ??? Assume you know who the Beatles are
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Actually, that's an Internet myth/fake news. Siri, by far, is the most used Voice Assistant, knows the most languages, etc. In the myriad of on line actual head to head tests, Siri is constantly shown to be far from "a disaster." Indeed, while they all have their respective advantages, e.g., CNN recently pointed out "Siri is the best at understanding natural language. It can pick up on multiple ways of asking the same questions, so you don't need to worry about remembering the exact phrasing for commands," when you average them out, overall, Siri does as well or better than the other assistants. But I get it, just like the "Apple is terrible at services" Internet meme was out there for a while until folks stopped to think, "hey their services is so successful that they are now the equivalent of a Fortune 100 company;" " hey, Apple's services dwarfs Facebooks entire revenue."

You might want to provide some facts to support this. Mixing user base numbers , revenue etc etc.... means little for a function in a very successful ecosystem, heck using this approach...one can argue iTunes Ping was great

I have google, Alexa and Siri.... Siri is far from the best at understanding my questions, I have to remember how to phrase the question to Siri. Do you use the other 2 major assistants ? So you can compare? To be honest what CNN says...... about tech, credible ?

 

[truthertech]

So you missed the obvious , that ringo is perceived as the least talented ??? Assume you know who the Beatles are
[doublepost=1504375494][/doublepost]

You might want to provide some facts to support this. Mixing user base numbers , revenue etc etc.... means little for a function in a very successful ecosystem, heck using this approach...one can argue iTunes Ping was great

I have google, Alexa and Siri.... Siri is far from the best at understanding my questions, I have to remember how to phrase the question to Siri. Do you use the other 2 major assistants ? So you can compare? To be honest what CNN says...... about tech, credible ?

I have used Google extensively, along with Siri. My experience, and the various studies, are the same. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, and all have a long way to go. For example, Google is stronger on search, but an assistant is much more than just returning search results. Most folks sadly have no idea what a true digital assistant can do, and they think it's primarily asking it to set a timer or state what the weather is, or convert ounces to grams.

Siri, now understands natural human language the best, and is very knowledgeable about news, weather, sports, movies, etc., but when you realize that Siri does so much more, people are surprised. I use Siri everyday to control Apple TV (no wonder Apple just won an award for Siri on Apple TV, it is great), set timers, read voice mails, read and send texts, get an Uber, make phone calls, check on traffic, turn down/up brightness, set reminders, navigate, etc.

 

[AZREOSpecialist]

Cue must have some dirt on Cook, I don't see any other reason how this joker can stay employed at Apple while doing absolutely NOTHING. The projects he heads are also Apple's most troubled. Gee, I wonder why? Cook fired Forstall, arguably one of the most important and influential people at post-Jobs Apple, and brought in this idiot Cue. Maybe one day Cue can buy himself a shirt that fits.

 

[SuprUsrStan]

Jony Ive isn’t responsible for hardware engineering.

Exactly, that's the problem. He said the mac will be THIS thin and hardware engineering tried to make it happen.

No but really, I think Jony Ive is defacto in charge of the mac designs. Notice how Bob Mansfield "Mac Hardware Engineering" position was removed and Dan Riccio's "Hardware Engineering" is now all encompassing.

Sure Jony Ive isn't the engineering the mac but he is shaping it and it's this exact clash of form vs function that gave us the 2016/2017 Macbook Pro that is too thin to even have USB-A ports and SD cards

 

[Rogifan]

Cue and Cook are very close friends .
That is why he was promoted to SVP when Cook took over as CEO. Steve Jobs knew better .

Eddy Cue was extremely close to Steve Jobs. According to Adam Lashinsky he was one of only 4 Apple employees present at Steve Jobs burial (the other three being Tim Cook, Jony Ive and Katie Cotton).
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Cue must have some dirt on Cook, I don't see any other reason how this joker can stay employed at Apple while doing absolutely NOTHING. The projects he heads are also Apple's most troubled. Gee, I wonder why? Cook fired Forstall, arguably one of the most important and influential people at post-Jobs Apple, and brought in this idiot Cue. Maybe one day Cue can buy himself a shirt that fits.

How was Forstall the most influential? I’ll take Craig Federighi over Forstall any day of the week.
[doublepost=1504401737][/doublepost]

Exactly, that's the problem. He said the mac will be THIS thin and hardware engineering tried to make it happen.

No but really, I think Jony Ive is defacto in charge of the mac designs. Notice how Bob Mansfield "Mac Hardware Engineering" position was removed and Dan Riccio's "Hardware Engineering" is now all encompassing.

Sure Jony Ive isn't the engineering the mac but he is shaping it and it's this exact clash of form vs function that gave us the 2016/2017 Macbook Pro that is too thin to even have USB-A ports and SD cards

It wouldn’t be different if Mansfield was still in charge. And the new Macs not having USB-A ports is not because Ive demanded a machine so thin it’s because Apple thinks USB-C is where it’s at now. And they decided to rip the band aid off instead of removing it slowly. Honestly I think Phil Schiller and his product marketing team has more to say about product decisions than anyone else in the company.

 

[Abazigal]

Exactly, that's the problem. He said the mac will be THIS thin and hardware engineering tried to make it happen.

No but really, I think Jony Ive is defacto in charge of the mac designs. Notice how Bob Mansfield "Mac Hardware Engineering" position was removed and Dan Riccio's "Hardware Engineering" is now all encompassing.

Sure Jony Ive isn't the engineering the mac but he is shaping it and it's this exact clash of form vs function that gave us the 2016/2017 Macbook Pro that is too thin to even have USB-A ports and SD cards

You make it sound like a bad thing. One could argue that the MacBook Pro is able to be as thin as it is precisely because it doesn't have to fit in USB-A ports and SD-card slots.

If hardware engineers had been in charge of deciding what the final product looked like, then Apple wouldn't be Apple. We would be stuck with extremely utilitarian and boring designs like pretty much every other PC company out there. We wouldn't have gotten the MacBook Air because no one in their right minds then would have thought of getting rid of the cd-drive. The MacBook Pro would still be extremely think and sporting all manner of ports.

When you buy into an Apple product, the implication is that you are buying into Apple's vision of how a product ought to be designed, and sometimes, that entails certain tradeoffs.

That said, I believe that there is 360-degree feedback to some extent. I also recall reading somewhere that Steve Job's greatest legacy would be instilling his design-first mentality into every worker at Apple, even the engineers. If the engineers are having problems making a certain requirement work, I am sure that they will feed this back to Ive somehow, but I think that on some level, they also understand that it is their job to make a certain concept work, and they take pride in working around the constraints placed on them from the product design.
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Bing? Bing? The Hotmail of search engines. Apple should just hand the map and search keys over to Google. Maybe Craig will realize this and Siri will just use Google. But I'm not a Chrome fan, for sure.

Apple did that with the first iPhone (google maps was the default). That decision ended up biting them in the behind when Google released Android and proceeded to favour its own platform by neutering Google Maps on iOS (also partly because Apple refused the share certain data with them).

If anything, this just goes to show that the safest hands are still your own. A company of Apple's size must never become too over-reliant on a third party for any of their critical infrastructure. If anything, maybe Apple should buy DuckDuckGo and make that the default in iOS, but right now, I suppose that 3 billion a year from Google is just too tantalising to give up.

 

[XTheLancerX]

Good. Siri needs help. Especially on Mac. It's a disaster. I asked my Mac, RIGHT after I just received a message, "Read me my most recent message", and it said, "you have messages from several conversations...", "<This person> said..." and it went and read my entire messages thread with that person starting from AUGUST 14TH. It went for probably hundreds of messages and it read every single one until yesterday. Went on for a few minutes. It finally asked at the end, "Do you want to reply?"

This thread was the third down from the top by the way. Not even the most recent thread I interacted with. I just don't understand.

Also the infamous interaction on Mac... "Set a timer for x minutes"... "I can't set a timer here. How about a reminder instead"? Wtf?

 

[MrNomNoms]

Siri has been a disaster compared to the competition, this was overdue

I think that is being rather melodramatic given that the competition are either entirely US-centric or if they're available overseas they support a very limited number of languages. So you either have average capabilities with large language support or great capabilities and it supports a small handful of languages. It has been over 2 years and Windows 10 still doesn't support New Zealand English, Alexa from Amazon can't even be bothered shipping outside of the United States because apparently overseas customers have cooties or they're vile creatures that Amazon has no interest in selling to. So compared to the mountain of crappy companies Siri comes off smelling like roses.

 

[Anuba]

I think that is being rather melodramatic given that the competition are either entirely US-centric or if they're available overseas they support a very limited number of languages. So you either have average capabilities with large language support or great capabilities and it supports a small handful of languages. It has been over 2 years and Windows 10 still doesn't support New Zealand English, Alexa from Amazon can't even be bothered shipping outside of the United States because apparently overseas customers have cooties or they're vile creatures that Amazon has no interest in selling to. So compared to the mountain of crappy companies Siri comes off smelling like roses.

A matter of preferences and priorities I suppose. Support for your native language isn't necessarily an advantage. I'm Swedish but I use U.S. English for practically everything – iOS language, macOS language, Siri. Why? Because if you set the system language to Swedish, all your apps become an inconsistent mess: Some are still in English, some have decent Swedish translations and others are so laughably bad (early machine translation bad) that they might as well be in Swahili. As for Siri, you get a bitcrushed semi-robotic voice vastly inferior to the English ones, but more importantly Siri no longer understands English app names, artist names, movie/TV show names or any of the dozens of English words we use daily. It's like trying to talk to Gordon Cole on Twin Peaks. You say "Halle Berry" and Siri thinks you said "Hälleberget" (the bedrock). Next thing she'll probably go "Hmm... Halle Berry... Bedrock... Aha!" and start playing the Flintstones movie.

So it's much better to just have the whole thing in English, meaning that the limited number of languages offered by Siri alternatives is a non-issue. What matters is which service is better at responding in the expected way, and Siri falls depressingly short there. The first time I tried Google Now (after a few months of Siri only) I probably had that "Eureka!" look of people who just got a cochlear implant and are hearing for the first time. Not only did it get every damn syllable 100% right, at a dizzying speed, it even produced useful results. Yeah, it won't accept your music playback instructions or open apps for you, but in most other respects it runs circles around Siri.
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Good. Siri needs help. Especially on Mac. It's a disaster. I asked my Mac, RIGHT after I just received a message, "Read me my most recent message", and it said, "you have messages from several conversations...", "<This person> said..." and it went and read my entire messages thread with that person starting from AUGUST 14TH. It went for probably hundreds of messages and it read every single one until yesterday. Went on for a few minutes. It finally asked at the end, "Do you want to reply?"

This thread was the third down from the top by the way. Not even the most recent thread I interacted with. I just don't understand.

Also the infamous interaction on Mac... "Set a timer for x minutes"... "I can't set a timer here. How about a reminder instead"? Wtf?

Yeah, there's lots of work to be done but the Mac version is still in its infancy. At least it appears to yield consistent results. Ever noticed how Siri on iOS will do different things with the exact same instruction from one day to the next? I have this playlist named "Run". I play it while I'm (drumroll...) running. With the Apple Workout app the music has to be started manually in the current version, so I usually start it by saying "Play playlist Run" or "Shuffle playlist Run". 4 times out of 5 it works, but sometimes it starts playing some damn global playlist from Apple Music or some Beats 1 radio crap or whatever it is. I tried a few different random things "Play MY playlist Run", "Play my LOCAL playlist Run" etc until I stumbled upon "Play my MUSIC playlist Run" which turned out to be the ticket. Same three words every time, different results. I know that people want AI to be more human and all, but I don't think emulation of early onset Alzheimer's is the quality they're looking for...
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Give iCloud and pro apps to someone else and move Eddy to LA to run iTunes, Apple Music and Apple content deals.

I thought he already ran Apple Music and that it was so lacklustre because he was busy trying to figure out which shiny fabrics and flourescent colors in shirts work best for making his beer gut visible from space.

 

[parapup]

I'm not sure how effective Craig will be either, if they keep handing everything to him? But he's clearly good at his job, unlike Eddie Cue - who nobody seems quite sure of.

Well Craig really has one job - iOS development. macOS porting of iOS features he doesn't need to be really involved with. Since Siri also is significant only to iOS it makes sense that he oversees it. Eddy Cue - never really understood what his impact on Apple was - just mediocrity and noise all over.

 

[SuprUsrStan]

It wouldn’t be different if Mansfield was still in charge. And the new Macs not having USB-A ports is not because Ive demanded a machine so thin it’s because Apple thinks USB-C is where it’s at now. And they decided to rip the band aid off instead of removing it slowly. Honestly I think Phil Schiller and his product marketing team has more to say about product decisions than anyone else in the company.

If it's all about ripping off a band aid and going all in USB-C, I'd actually be all for it. However Apple just can't get their story straight. Everything should move to USB-C if that was the case, including iPhones, iPads, and even air pods. Instead, they too afraid to move forward and fully peel that band aid and go USB-C so we're left with Lightning ear pods that can't even work with the Macbook Pros.

 

[MrNomNoms]

A matter of preferences and priorities I suppose. Support for your native language isn't necessarily an advantage. I'm Swedish but I use U.S. English for practically everything – iOS language, macOS language, Siri. Why? Because if you set the system language to Swedish, all your apps become an inconsistent mess: Some are still in English, some have decent Swedish translations and others are so laughably bad (early machine translation bad) that they might as well be in Swahili. As for Siri, you get a bitcrushed semi-robotic voice vastly inferior to the English ones, but more importantly Siri no longer understands English app names, artist names, movie/TV show names or any of the dozens of English words we use daily. It's like trying to talk to Gordon Cole on Twin Peaks. You say "Halle Berry" and Siri thinks you said "Hälleberget" (the bedrock). Next thing she'll probably go "Hmm... Halle Berry... Bedrock... Aha!" and start playing the Flintstones movie.

The problem is that without language support the service cannot understand the New Zealand accent therefore we might speak English but it has to be tuned to understand individual accents be they Australian, New Zealand, South African or British otherwise the service keeps coming back saying that it doesn't understand me. I use UK English for my language but they still need to make the software aware of the pronunciation differences.

 

[JamesPDX]

Yeah, there really needs to be a deep voice-recognition training program and it would probably work.

Like this, but much, much more complex:

Cirrus. Socrates. Particle. Decibel. Hurricane. Dolphin. Tulip. Monica. David. Doctor. Zaius.

 

[MH01]

I have used Google extensively, along with Siri. My experience, and the various studies, are the same. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, and all have a long way to go. For example, Google is stronger on search, but an assistant is much more than just returning search results. Most folks sadly have no idea what a true digital assistant can do, and they think it's primarily asking it to set a timer or state what the weather is, or convert ounces to grams.

Siri, now understands natural human language the best, and is very knowledgeable about news, weather, sports, movies, etc., but when you realize that Siri does so much more, people are surprised. I use Siri everyday to control Apple TV (no wonder Apple just won an award for Siri on Apple TV, it is great), set timers, read voice mails, read and send texts, get an Uber, make phone calls, check on traffic, turn down/up brightness, set reminders, navigate, etc.

You just have to use what works for you . In relation to movies and shows, do you find that many questions relating to those and up with Siri pushing you to iTunes Store. That frustrated me . To be honest when Siri could not find the Olympic medal tally for the last olympics I completely gave up on it. Was not even the top result and it gave results to olhmpics some 10 years ago....having a good search for me is essential to a good experience with an AI. These days I use Alexa the most .

Can you clarify what you mean by natural human language, cause I find Siri can understand me, though the result / response is not natural for me at times .

 

[truthertech]

You just have to use what works for you . In relation to movies and shows, do you find that many questions relating to those and up with Siri pushing you to iTunes Store. That frustrated me . To be honest when Siri could not find the Olympic medal tally for the last olympics I completely gave up on it. Was not even the top result and it gave results to olhmpics some 10 years ago....having a good search for me is essential to a good experience with an AI. These days I use Alexa the most .

Can you clarify what you mean by natural human language, cause I find Siri can understand me, though the result / response is not natural for me at times .

Here's a good article on natural language processing, even bigger things to come from Siri with Apples purchase of VocalIQ.


http://www.businessinsider.com/how-apples-vocaliq-ai-works-2016-5

 

[Anuba]

You just have to use what works for you . In relation to movies and shows, do you find that many questions relating to those and up with Siri pushing you to iTunes Store. That frustrated me . To be honest when Siri could not find the Olympic medal tally for the last olympics I completely gave up on it. Was not even the top result and it gave results to olhmpics some 10 years ago....having a good search for me is essential to a good experience with an AI. These days I use Alexa the most .

The part about Siri serving Apple instead of the customer was one of Wozniak's many gripes with Siri, and I couldn't agree more.

These days TV shows become available for streaming across the whole western hemisphere on Netflix, HBO etc simultaneously, and the US release date is therefore also the Swedish or Danish or UK release date. I once made the mistake of asking Siri about when the new season of a show starts. I got the same reaction you did, but an even more useless response – the Swedish edition of iTunes Store doesn't have TV shows, so no matter what I ask that has anything to do with TV shows, I get the same response: "Sorry, TV shows are not available on the iTunes Store in your country". That's so unhelpful it borders on offensive.

In other words, "I'm Siri, your personal assistant" is a partial lie. She secretly has a blue Apple Store clerk T-shirt underneath whatever she's wearing. You can ask for time or directions, but soon enough you'll stumble upon an area where she will only help you if there's money in it for Apple. That's actually not cool. Anything that presents itself as a "personal assistant" needs to mimic basic loyalty towards the user. Otherwise they might as well stop calling them cutesy female names and start naming them "Wormtongue" and "Littlefinger". A future where personal assistants are little more than product placement peddlers seems kind of depressing. "Hey Siri, I need to lose weight, what do you suggest I eat?" "You should definitely have three deep-fried Big Macs (special offer this week, only $4.99!) and a bucket of Crisco. Very nutritious and great for your cardiovascular health, I promise."

 

[Applebot1]

The Executive team needs new energy and direction.

 

[HMFIC03]

Craig should be the CEO

 

[albebaubles]

True. I've made the same point about his supply chain expertise being useful for the logistics that the iPhone caused. My point is valid nonetheless. If there were no iPhone--and its offspring of products and services--Cook's skills would not have accomplished the same. Similarly, the least qualified CEO could accomplish much of the same with a product as popular as the iPhone. Ironically, Cook's pay was reduced last year when he failed to meet shareholder expectations!

Until Cook has to gamble on a product that wasn't already in the pipeline, I wouldn't overestimate his influence.

AirPods?

 

[truthertech]

AirPods?

Apple Watch?

 

[SSDGUY]

A long time ago …

 

[KB_Sez]

Serious question, no sarcasm intended - what's Cue's biggest accomplishments in last 18-24 months?

Poor keynote presentations?

 

[MH01]

The part about Siri serving Apple instead of the customer was one of Wozniak's many gripes with Siri, and I couldn't agree more.

These days TV shows become available for streaming across the whole western hemisphere on Netflix, HBO etc simultaneously, and the US release date is therefore also the Swedish or Danish or UK release date. I once made the mistake of asking Siri about when the new season of a show starts. I got the same reaction you did, but an even more useless response – the Swedish edition of iTunes Store doesn't have TV shows, so no matter what I ask that has anything to do with TV shows, I get the same response: "Sorry, TV shows are not available on the iTunes Store in your country". That's so unhelpful it borders on offensive.

In other words, "I'm Siri, your personal assistant" is a partial lie. She secretly has a blue Apple Store clerk T-shirt underneath whatever she's wearing. You can ask for time or directions, but soon enough you'll stumble upon an area where she will only help you if there's money in it for Apple. That's actually not cool. Anything that presents itself as a "personal assistant" needs to mimic basic loyalty towards the user. Otherwise they might as well stop calling them cutesy female names and start naming them "Wormtongue" and "Littlefinger". A future where personal assistants are little more than product placement peddlers seems kind of depressing. "Hey Siri, I need to lose weight, what do you suggest I eat?" "You should definitely have three deep-fried Big Macs (special offer this week, only $4.99!) and a bucket of Crisco. Very nutritious and great for your cardiovascular health, I promise."

That is one of the reasons I stopped using Siri, no matter what question u asked in relation to a show, it ignored the question and pushed me to iTunes . Horrible experience

As you said, when an AInassitant serves the user, it's its doing its job, Siri serves iTunes first , or apple as you put it

 

[tipoo]

Good old days...

From the recent Scott Forstall interviews it really seemed like he still wouldn't feel out of place on an Apple stage. Skeomorphic textures aside, iOS also felt more stable under him, and that era is when it gained its reputation for legendary smoothness. Ever since iOS7 under Ive, I notice frame drops all over the place, and any amount of radars don't seem to make them care about it.

 

[TechZeke]

Exactly, that's the problem. He said the mac will be THIS thin and hardware engineering tried to make it happen.

No but really, I think Jony Ive is defacto in charge of the mac designs. Notice how Bob Mansfield "Mac Hardware Engineering" position was removed and Dan Riccio's "Hardware Engineering" is now all encompassing.

Sure Jony Ive isn't the engineering the mac but he is shaping it and it's this exact clash of form vs function that gave us the 2016/2017 Macbook Pro that is too thin to even have USB-A ports and SD cards

I'd say Ive is like the Architect, while Riccio is like the Civil Engineer for a building.