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Apple Brings in New Exec to 'Fix' Siri and Apple Intelligence
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Might as well light that money on fire. Or you can listen to Ellison himself when he stated that citizens will behave better when surveilled. Oracle is basically the backbone of CIA technical capabilities already…
Billionaire Larry Ellison says a vast AI-fueled surveillance system can ensure 'citizens will be on their best behavior'
Billionaire Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison said he expects AI surveillance systems to reach a point where all citizens are under constant watch.
www.businessinsider.com
I think these data centers going up are actually going to wind up being used for surveillance when everything is said and done 🤷♂️
Anyway, back on topic regarding Apple. I think they’re smart in how they’ve approaching AI from a business sense. It’s not a viable business model, but instead the *personal context* of Apple Intelligence makes for a great product *feature*.
It’s embarrassing but the fact stands that the leadership doesn’t care. Worse, this new exec is not going to fix the problem because the whole culture is rotten to its Apple core.
Bruh!!!!
Apple is making an internal staffing change that it hopes will improve Siri and its artificial intelligence offerings, reports Bloomberg. Kim Vorrath, a 37-year Apple veteran, will join the AI team to work under AI chief John Giannandrea.
Vorrath is a program management VP, and has a reputation for meticulously managing software projects at Apple and ensuring employees meet deadlines. She has been described as Apple's "bug wrangler" and as a "powerful force" in the company. For the last few years, she has been working on Apple's AR/VR team developing the Vision Pro headset, but now she is being moved to AI.
The news comes just after a widely circulated story about Siri's failure to accurately provide basic knowledge about Super Bowl results. Siri has long been seen as inferior to other personal assistants, and in recent years, Siri has been unable to measure up to AI-based chatbots.
Apple is also addressing widespread criticism of its Apple Intelligence Notification summary feature, which has on several occasions mistakenly summarized news stories in a way that produced confusing false headlines. To fix the problem, Apple is temporarily removing Notification summaries for news and entertainment apps in iOS 18.3, an update expected next week.
Apple attempted to improve Siri by integrating OpenAI's ChatGPT into Apple Intelligence, but there are still serious problems with Siri. Additional Siri features are going to be coming in the near future as part of an iOS 18.4 update, and in iOS 19, Apple is rumored to be planning to introduce an LLM version of Siri that will be comparable to ChatGPT and Google's Gemini.
According to Bloomberg, Vorrath's move to the AI team is a signal that the company sees AI as more important than the Vision Pro. Vorrath is known for organizing engineering groups and redesigning workflows with new processes.
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.
Article Link: Apple Brings in New Exec to 'Fix' Siri and Apple Intelligence
Seriosuly?! Seriously!!!
John Giannandrea specifically hired to boost Siri and A.i work at Apple over 6yrs ago!
Less than 12mths boosted to executive role and gets stock options yet ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to show for it in that time!
3yrs and Siri gets a few softwr voice tweaks which hardly ANY user can tell, new HomePod mini's with tweaks to sending home messages to other pod minis which has NOTHING to do with John btw another team did that, and a few more langauges supported!
Now you need to hire another person reporting to John Giannandrea to fix Siri?!
Siri is NOT thr problem here its your Google trojan horse John Giannandrea! Hint: what happened to Nokia's mobile division when a Microsoft exec was hired to lead as CEO?! Can anyone guess or better yet use gOogle Gemini to find the amswer vs gOogle search!
Craig supposedly brought A.i. to teams at Apple since they missed the boat! Why where they late with an A.i. experience person on the team?!
Exactly!
Scott Forstall was booted for not apologizing for Maps - data points where 3rd parry and NOT his fault!
So WHOM should be fired or forced for a major public apology NOW regarding Siri's delayed and missed A.i. while everyone in competition developed their own solution while Apple became THE last partner for OpenAI - yet another reliance on Microsoft!! We thought this was done long ago!
So yeah whom should be forced to apologize or get booted now ...Seriously!!?? Seriosuly!
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I wonder which will happen first
- Siri gets better
- New Airpods Max
- New iPhone Mini
- New iPad Mini
- Artemis 3 has Americans walking on the Moon again (currently set for mid to late 2027)
"This year, the artificial intelligence group is focused on revamping the underlying infrastructure of Siri and improving the company’s in-house AI models, Giannandrea said in the memo."
9to5mac.com
Here are Apple’s two main priorities for AI this year, per leaked memo - 9to5Mac
A leaked memo has revealed what Apple’s two internal priorities are for improving Apple Intelligence this year.
9to5mac.com
Fascinating that Apple would spend years, billions and their best engineers on pointless (Apple car) and semi-pointless (Vision pro) ventures and yet couldn' find it in them to fix a major feature of their main cash cow and emblematic product.
Better (very) late than never i guess.
Better (very) late than never i guess.
Indeed. I messed around with Super Bowl winners today in order to see how bad it was for myself, and I found that the quality of the results depended upon how I asked the questions. Siri scored 100% in my admittedly small sampling if the questions were unambiguous and didn’t use Roman numerals (in cases where I typed the question).
But people will understandably expect Siri to just work, and won’t want to think about how to phrase questions.
I actually don't mind that as much as Siri defaulting to "if I don't understand the request, it's probably a kind of music they want, so I'll cheerfully announce that I'm playing some polkas chosen specially for you".
I still stand with my conspiracy theory that they bought Siri, the whole team left since and they don't have the right (skilled) people to actually develop in further. Might go as far as not understanding it's core because it was initially developed by a whole different group of people.
The problem is that they make no money from Siri or AI
And with how bad they both are, there is no path to charging anyone for either anytime soon (if ever)
Do they make money from reminders or notes ? it's supposed to be a core feature.
And they wasted how much on Apple car?
They don't, no
Reminders and Notes are orders of magnitude simpler in terms of the problem though
I'm not defending Apple at all -- I think they'd like to fix Siri but have simply been unable to.
One wonders how financially committed they are to making it better though (seems like not too much)
I agree with you -- they've wasted billions on VR goggles and the Car and many other things
Well, I actually like their shows (even if nobody watches them). But still , not a reason for letting Siri rot.
They need to in all honesty. I was trying to listen to that new Sexxy Red and Bruno Mars song “Fat Juicy & Wet” and it started playing Nelly’s “Hot in Here.” Terrible for a speaker that exclusively relies on Siri for commands.
I think a big part of the problem is that Apple promoted Siri as being able to understand any natural language question when the tubes and wires behind the facade were absolutely not capable of anything remotely like understanding natural language questions, and Apple just ran with the "fake it until you make it" strategy. So they didn't establish specific syntax / grammar, and you can't go check detailed documentation of how to format a particular request so that Siri will understand (they have lists of examples of things you could ask, but they're just "giving ideas", and not exhaustive).
Recent example that sticks in my head:
- "Hey Siri, remind me in one hour to pick out a shirt for tomorrow"
- "Okay, I'll remind you at 1am tomorrow to pick out a shirt"
It's like some rom-com plot device where a person gets hired as the personal assistant of some executive they have a crush on, but fakes knowing the language in order to get hired, and then awkward hilarity ensues when they constantly misunderstand basic requests. In the real world, though, that would just get you fired.
And then, on the opposite side, I randomly asked Siri "what shape is an Erlenmeyer flask" (because I was trying to see if I was remembering the right name), and Siri correctly replied "according to Wikipedia, it's cone." It's just really hard to know what Siri can parse and what it can't, leading to people wasting time asking all sorts of questions / making requests Siri has no chance of answering correctly
I would have much preferred it if Apple had released Siri with "Siri can understand these two dozen spoken commands in these specific formats", and then progressively expanded upon the vocabulary over the years until they reached the point where Siri could understand most natural language.
Yep, we should definitely get the cast of Severance to go work on Siri instead of making a TV show. Because those skill sets are definitely interchangeable.
Silo is awesome, BTW.
There're good shows in Tv+ for sure. But in a tech company they should prioritize tech products.
I wouldn't blame the software developers. The problems most complained about by Siri critics lay in the areas of product marketing and product management, that is, with the people who determine what the market wants and what the product should be. The fact that they are making a switch in program management tells you that Apple sees problems in either meeting timelines, managing budgets, alignment/communication between stakeholders, or cross functional coordination. Fixing problems in those areas will not address fundamental issues in product definition, vision, priorities, or roadmap.
I was thinking the same, it would put some pressure on them to do something great.
I just want to be able to type a text message without having to correct words every single time! Too much to ask??
I wish we could have device specific name options for Siri
As it is now, I have "hey siri" off on anything other than my phone because it was always randomly deciding which device to actually reply to my request on (and it was very often not the one I wanted, was using or that which was physically closest to me)
Given that
I'd prefer to be able to say "Hey Pad" for my iPad and "Hey Phone" for my iPhone and "Hey Mac" for my Mac Mini
(just examples)
As it is now, I have "hey siri" off on anything other than my phone because it was always randomly deciding which device to actually reply to my request on (and it was very often not the one I wanted, was using or that which was physically closest to me)
Given that
I'd prefer to be able to say "Hey Pad" for my iPad and "Hey Phone" for my iPhone and "Hey Mac" for my Mac Mini
(just examples)
This is the way. Siri gained a reputation for being inferior and that reputation has stuck. A new name would be a good step forward.