Apple Brings in New Exec to 'Fix' Siri and Apple Intelligence

[turbineseaplane]

I can’t even believe anybody is defending Siri and/or Apples total lack of meaningful progress on this project for over a decade

I thought I’d seen it all, but apparently not

I mean this article is literally about them bringing in new leadership to try to “fix it” so it’s obviously not great, according to Apple themselves

It would seem this point would be obvious

 

[vantelimus]

I can’t even believe anybody is defending Siri and/or Apples total lack of meaningful progress on this project for over a decade

Perhaps your idea of what Siri should do and Apple's ideas are different. Don't buy the product if it doesn't meet your needs. Or buy the product and advocate new features. Demeaning Apple and saying the product is broken because it doesn't do what you think it should doesn't really help anyone. Try positive advocacy instead of putting down Apple and anyone who disagree with you.

I thought I’d seen it all, but apparently not

I mean this article is literally about them bringing in new leadership to try to “fix it” so it’s obviously not great, according to Apple themselves

See my previous answer. Project management will only "fix" problems with project management and cross functional coordination/communication. It will not change product marketing or product management decisions. It won't change the definition of Siri. It will only manage the schedules of the engineers as they build what they are told to build.

 

[Karma*Police]

What I don't understand is how it took Apple execs this long to figure out that Siri sucks. It makes one wonder what this executive team has been up to all this time.

It's time for Steve 2.0 to come and clean house. The hard part is finding Steve 2.0. It took Microsoft well over a decade to find an exec that gets it, and it looks like they'll play a role in Stargate, a $500B AI project, while Apple falls further and further behind.

 

[Stiksi]

Probably the worse dangle is the grouping of two processors (max & ultra) with the Mac Studio. Still M2 based. They should have sold the models separately because of the delays with ultra production. Yes treating it as bad as Mac Pro. Then we turn to AI, where’s the AI query summaries for an enhanced Safari that would be useful. Macs can work around this, but not iOS/iPadOS. We certainly all have the mixed opinions about AI up to 18.3. We hope after the WWDC sales pitch 18.4 is worth it.

Ha, my opinion of AI is not mixed at all 🧨🚽😊 but I won't turn this thread into that battleground.

 

[FlyingDutch]

Precisely this. To this developer, Siri gives off the feel of a huge pile of spaghetti code that contains all sorts of unwarranted assumptions that individual developers made at various times, assuming "if I find these two words in the sentence, that definitely means the intent of the sentence is X", when that's just one of many things it could mean.

Way too many special cases, trying to pretend that there's an actual understanding of language when there's isn't. Like every time they are faced with a thing Siri doesn't understand, they add yet another patch to handle that specific case, breaking several others in the process.

Nice. Making assumptions about me, and maybe you could discover I was a developer before some of you were in the kindergarten …
Very peculiar to see so many developers in the forum claiming to be better than Apple’s. I wouldn’t go that far. I’m modest.

And then you asserted that, for the problems I detailed, the fault was mine and not Siri's.

Just guessing. I used YOUR EXACT SENTENCE by the way. And it worked. Pronunciation ? Again, just guessing…

Maybe, but the goal of Siri should be to work for everyone, shouldn’t it?

For Siri I AM everyone. Maybe it is just different expectations.

Also, this paragraph boils down to “You’re talking to it wrong.” There should be no concept of “trying to use correct phrases.”

Much like Face ID: You look at the device and it recognizes you. You don’t have to look at it a certain way or blink twice or anything… it just works. In fact, often it just works so well that you don’t even think about it. These are the types of software experiences that Apple has rightfully trained us over the years to expect from them.

I didn’t ask anything unreasonable of Siri — it pulls its weather data from Apple Weather, which has minute-by-minute precipitation forecasts. Upon opening the Apple Weather app once I was able to come to a brief stop, it told me that rain would stop in about 25 minutes. This information is also made available in iOS widgets, which considering how WidgetKit works on iOS means there shouldn’t be a huge leap to make this information also available to Siri if it isn’t already.

And yet “when will it stop raining” and “how long will it be raining” somehow weren’t sufficient for Siri to glean that I was looking for something more specific than “this afternoon,” especially when, once again, it was already afternoon. Does that mean 5 minutes from now or 2 hours for now? Completely unhelpful.

In fact, for the first query it couldn’t even tell I was asking for a forecast at all! It just told me it was raining…when my query should have implied that I was aware it was already raining.

That is absolutely a Siri problem, and a serious one. Maybe I just need to find the “correct phrase,” but I’m not sure what it would be. It shouldn’t be my problem, either.

Claiming to be a developer and bringing a FaceID example that really has nothing to do with language recognition …
But again, I’m not saying Siri is perfect: in your example the answer should have been available (didn’t try yet, it is not raining here 😅).
I’m just saying Siri is not a complete mess like someone is saying.

I can’t even believe anybody is defending Siri and/or Apples total lack of meaningful progress on this project for over a decade

I thought I’d seen it all, but apparently not

I mean this article is literally about them bringing in new leadership to try to “fix it” so it’s obviously not great, according to Apple themselves

It would seem this point would be obvious

Incidentally Siri is criticized by people here well known to criticize Apple on almost every single post, about everything. That raises my suspects a little.

By the way, please get your facts straight: Apple never spoke about “fixing Siri”.
From the article:

In a memo announcing the change, Giannandrea said that Apple plans to focus on improving the Siri infrastructure as well as Apple's in-house AI models.

They are going to IMPROVE it.
I think no one is saying Siri doesn’t need improvements.

 

[Expos of 1969]

They are going to IMPROVE it.
I think no one is saying Siri doesn’t need improvements.

Surely you don't think that the Apple marketing spin doctors would actually use the word fix? Read between the lines. Improve means fix.

 

[Manzanito]

For Siri I AM everyone. Maybe it is just different expectations.

Ok, then apple should invest the money allocated to siri r&d in a giant “Mission accomplished” banner, I guess.

 

[Cunir]

this new homepod hub thing has probably given them the big shove they need to finally improve siri... imagine all the news stories about people having trouble locking their front doors and turning on their security alarms because siri doesn't understand what they're saying. they could get away with siri being flakey when it was just people trying to play a song, but not with all the stuff that this homehub is supposed to do

 

[pappl]

She will have a lot of work to do.
👍

 

[michaelsviews]

So there will be vacancies ? Current management can't get the job done no need to keep them on.

 

[FlyingDutch]

Surely you don't think that the Apple marketing spin doctors would actually use the word fix? Read between the lines. Improve means fix.

There is no marketing in internal moves. They are not moving an engineer/developer. They are moving management because they most probably are forecasting a lot of works in the AI sector.

this new homepod hub thing has probably given them the big shove they need to finally improve siri... imagine all the news stories about people having trouble locking their front doors and turning on their security alarms because siri doesn't understand what they're saying. they could get away with siri being flakey when it was just people trying to play a song, but not with all the stuff that this homehub is supposed to do

There already are a lot of people using Siri to lock doors and set security alarms.

 

[FlyingDutch]

So there will be vacancies ? Current management can't get the job done no need to keep them on.

Sure, and there clearly are a lot of people in this very thread ready to get the job done 😅

 

[Expos of 1969]

There is no marketing in internal moves. They are not moving an engineer/developer. They are moving management because they most probably are forecasting a lot of works in the AI sector.

You really live in your own world which has little connection to reality. Shame you are fellow EU resident. Good luck.

 

[FlyingDutch]

You really live in your own world which has little connection to reality. Shame you are fellow EU resident. Good luck.

Yes, a world where real people doesn’t just bash Apple on a forum for the sake of it.

 

[jonblatho]

Claiming to be a developer and bringing a FaceID example that really has nothing to do with language recognition …
But again, I’m not saying Siri is perfect: in your example the answer should have been available (didn’t try yet, it is not raining here 😅).
I’m just saying Siri is not a complete mess like someone is saying.

It’s not a mess for you. For countless others, it is. This includes in U.S. English, which in general gets the best of Apple’s services (being in U.S. English themselves) and gets them first.

I brought up Face ID because it’s a software experience that’s so seamless that you forget it’s even there. You interact with it likely dozens of times a day without even thinking about it. Again, these are the experiences that Apple has trained us to expect from them. This is the baseline.

And it should also be the case for Siri. You shouldn’t have to think of “correct phrases” but rather just…tell it what to do.

 

[CarlJ]

And it should also be the case for Siri. You shouldn’t have to think of “correct phrases” but rather just…tell it what to do.

Not just "shouldn't have to think of correct phrases" - Apple has repeatedly gone out of its way to portray Siri as responding to natural spoken language, rather than publishing a specific list of correct phrases.

 

[Manzanito]

It’s not a mess for you. For countless others, it is. This includes in U.S. English, which in general gets the best of Apple’s services (being in U.S. English themselves) and gets them first.

I brought up Face ID because it’s a software experience that’s so seamless that you forget it’s even there. You interact with it likely dozens of times a day without even thinking about it. Again, these are the experiences that Apple has trained us to expect from them. This is the baseline.

And it should also be the case for Siri. You shouldn’t have to think of “correct phrases” but rather just…tell it what to do.

“You’re phrasing it wrong” 😂😂😂

 

[FlyingDutch]

It’s not a mess for you. For countless others, it is. This includes in U.S. English, which in general gets the best of Apple’s services (being in U.S. English themselves) and gets them first.

I brought up Face ID because it’s a software experience that’s so seamless that you forget it’s even there. You interact with it likely dozens of times a day without even thinking about it. Again, these are the experiences that Apple has trained us to expect from them. This is the baseline.

And it should also be the case for Siri. You shouldn’t have to think of “correct phrases” but rather just…tell it what to do.

You nailed it. Not being a mess for me (and countless others… whatever that means without any documented number) means Siri IT IS NOT AN OVERALL MESS.
Maybe it is for you and your needs.
That’s a different matter.

I’d like Siri to be better, for sure. I never said it was perfect.

 

[UpsideDownEclair]

Siri IT IS NOT AN OVERALL MESS.

So true! It just works.

 

[thebart]

„introduce an LLM version of ‌Siri‌ that will be comparable to ChatGPT and Google's Gemini“

This requires an absurd amount of data, together with insane computing power, an insane amount of NVidias blackwell chips together with a nuclear power plant. With hardware, Apple needs just a model and experts who know their business …

Apple should buy Aleph e.g. Alpha since Apple can‘t jump with Tim as CEO.

They could try to duplicate what deep seek did?

 

[FlyingDutch]

So true! It just works.
View attachment 2476789

I don’t know what to tell you… I just tried in my native language and it just works



You can translate from Italian, but the answer is 13th June 2025, that is correct 🤷🏻‍♂️

The only difference I can see here is I don’t have Apple Intelligence, since it is not yet available in EU.

 

[UpsideDownEclair]

I don’t know what to tell you… I just tried in my native language and it just works

View attachment 2476833

You can translate from Italian, but the answer is 13th June 2025, that is correct 🤷🏻‍♂️

The only difference I can see here is I don’t have Apple Intelligence, since it is not yet available in EU.

That’s a, “here’s what I found on the web”, answer showing you a Reddit post, though. Which, fair enough for whoever finds that useful regardless of system language.

Alas, it doesn’t quite feel fitting for what Apple stresses to be an “intelligent assistant” that harnesses “world knowledge” to some capacity. As I said in another post, we’ll see about on-screen awareness/personal context queries.

Just – the fact that Siri got that simple query completely wrong (in US English at that) doesn’t instill much confidence.

Hence the “it just works!!!!1!”; even the NLP isn’t consistent after this many advances in machine learning and mic technology, which begs the question: What IS Apple doing?

Because while I’m glad Siri does work for you, I, as well as others in this thread have noticed little to no improvement. These aren’t mutually exclusive.

 

[FlyingDutch]

That’s a, “here’s what I found on the web”, answer showing you a Reddit post, though. Which, fair enough for whoever finds that useful regardless of system language.

Alas, it doesn’t quite feel fitting for what Apple stresses to be an “intelligent assistant” that harnesses “world knowledge” to some capacity. As I said in another post, we’ll see about on-screen awareness/personal context queries.

Just – the fact that Siri got that simple query completely wrong (in US English at that) doesn’t instill much confidence.

Hence the “it just works!!!!1!”; even the NLP isn’t consistent after this many advances in machine learning and mic technology, which begs the question: What IS Apple doing?

Because while I’m glad Siri does work for you, I, as well as others in this thread have noticed little to no improvement. These aren’t mutually exclusive.

It is what it is, but it actually answered the question in a pertinent way 🤷🏻‍♂️
And in a foreign language ( for sure , Siri ain’t Italian 😅).
So why the difference?
I remember Siri being quite inaccurate a few years ago. But I definitely did notice an improvement over the time. Now I’m curious to see what will happen in a few weeks when AI will be activated also in EU…

 

[AndiG]

They could try to duplicate what deep seek did?

They could - but all of this reminds me of Apple Maps 🙈

And further more - do you know what deep seek did? very short: DeepSeek used other LLMs to train their own model so that it produces similar answers. This approach would be nice to replace Siri and the DeepSeek model is opensource (so go for it, Apple).

But DS is not comparable to ChatGpt or Gemini, since it misses the „deep“ knowledge.

 

[UpsideDownEclair]

It is what it is, but it actually answered the question in a pertinent way 🤷🏻‍♂️
And in a foreign language ( for sure , Siri ain’t Italian 😅).
So why the difference?
I remember Siri being quite inaccurate a few years ago. But I definitely did notice an improvement over the time. Now I’m curious to see what will happen in a few weeks when AI will be activated also in EU…

Again though, you finding Siri useful and somebody else having a subpar experience aren’t mutually exclusive. These are both already true at the same time.

Pointing out mistakes made by Siri != bashing Apple. At least they’re not necessarily the same.

Going on a slight tangent, people are rightfully doubting that a conversational Siri won’t fumble even more frequently for some, because generative AI comes across as a perpetual alpha as is, and is still being deployed to billions with warnings and disclaimers to “check important info for mistakes”.

I just don’t believe this bodes well for Apple Intelligence.