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Apple Intelligence Siri Overhaul Could Get Delayed
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As you pointed out the general story is out there and is well known. Do the specifics really matter at this point? Siri has needed to be rewritten for a very long time now. It wasn’t technology that Apple developed in-house, it was acquired and integrated into iOS. It was clear before ChatGPT and the large leaps enabled by LLMs like it that Siri was a mess and needed a total re-write and the appearance of LLMs has further exacerbated what was an already a large gap between Apple and it’s competitors.
Why Apple has been so reluctant to re-write something that clearly needed it is hard to say but it’s no doubt a combo meal of mismanagement from the top down with infighting / rivalry within the team itself and likely infighting / rival among the Siri / in-house AI team and other teams at Apple as well.
I mean I've managed many years without Siri now after the initial excitement when it was first released. I can honestly say the only thing I ever use Siri for is timers when cooking. And even then sometimes it gets it wrong.
If Siri was completely removed from the Apple Operating Systems I for one wouldn't miss it.
My worry is that this is the case with a lot of their software and platforms. It feels like a lot of it is a mess now tbh, because they rush things through and then get excited about something else so don't really finish things off. Maybe this is because they are always behind with their software and constantly playing catchup?
I've raised it before but there is so much basic functionality missing from things like Launchpad that could make it such a useful tool. I use it a lot, but to be able to customise it a little bit more (decide what I want on there) would make a whole world of difference. Siri suffers from the exact same Apple syndrome. Tiny things, big experience impacts.
Did I suggest in any way this didnt make sense to me?
No. No I didnt.
What I did say, however, is that increasingly features are delayed and delayed,
There was a time when ALL features announced in WWDC appeared in the September release.
Then, some things slipped to November.
Then, some things slipped to March - I believe Universal Control was one of the longest delayed things till now.
However, we are at the time where things are often delayed, and to the point where it's becoming silly. Do you really think April (at the earliest) is great for things announced the previous June?
My solution to this is simple. Apple... stop chasing your tail and desperate for a new iOS major release every year. We dont need it. We dont want it if it's buggy or delayed. Have a year off - bring us some great updates every 2 years but please make sure they are ALL ready for 'release' day.
Given their entire marketing campaign for the iPhone 16 was Apple Intelligence it will be interesting to see how many of these delayed features then go on to require the iPhone 17 (even if the 16 is fully capable which I'm sure it will be). iOS 19 needs to offer the entire feature set to 16 (and maybe 15 pro) users and not the usual apple 'borked' version that says you need the latest handset to access all the best new features of the latest OS.
To restrict any functionality to the new handset would be a kick in the teeth for anyone that bought the 16 based on its marketing campaign promises and expectations.
To restrict any functionality to the new handset would be a kick in the teeth for anyone that bought the 16 based on its marketing campaign promises and expectations.
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This is actually a good point.
Whereas I dont think that Apple Intelligence, at least the first iteration, will need anything more than the currently supported models i.e. 15 pros and 16s.... technical requirements will obviously change as time goes by and successive iPhones will get performance upgrades and successive iterations of iOS will need the extra horsepower.
That said, you can say that about most new iOS features anyway over the years.
But, I wonder how people feel who bought an iPhone in September 2024 given the massive marketing push of 'apple intelligence is here' or whatever they said.
Many people that dont read websites and frequent forums (i.e. NOT us) might rightly feel a bit hard done by that their new iPhone they bought in September still wont get those AI features promised until April earliest.
Arguably, if AI was the reason you upgraded, you may as well just sat out the 16 and waited for the 17.
Apple hasn’t done many things right since Tim Cook is leading it. If we want to discuss Apple intelligence the notifications summaries were so bad Apple had to withdraw the feature and playground is a joke, by far the worst image generation tool.
Probably before the internet thinking about it when software had to be physically shipped to be fair. Now it's just slap it out in the earliest form of Beta / MVP and we will drip feed updates when we get round to it. Until a year has past and then we start all over again with the next major release 😂
But seriously, even WITH the internet things have never been as bad as they have now with over promising and underdelivering on software - and likely undervaluing good developers is no coincidence.
There’s not a lot you can’t do with 3 trillion dollars.
Yes also Nokia was on top of the world, until it wasn’t. Same for Kodak.
When companies sit on their success and let the marketing people run the company, they keep proposing the same old stuff in different colors and sizes. That can last for a while but sooner or later the chain of luck and success will break.
Apple doesn’t have an ace up their sleeve anymore.
iPhone is the same product since iPhone 12. Apple Watch 4,5,6,7,8,9 were the same product. I give some credit to the series 10 maybe.
Regardless, their hardware is good, too good maybe, because it doesn’t leave margin of improvement. The issue is their software. It is absolute rubbish.
You can’t even use the music app on Mac and select which song to play next, it doesn’t play it!! It plays the next song of the album you are playing it instead.
There is not a single feature that works as you’d expect!
It’s a joke. Rubbish.
Bloody thing can’t even make a phone call to my wife saying no such contract in my contracts. I’ve always had iPhone but this has becomes a failed experiment
Apple's smarter version of Siri that incorporates Apple Intelligence features could end up being delayed, reports Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. Apple is running into engineering problems and software bugs that could push back the launch of the new functionality.
Rumors suggested that Apple planned to introduce the new Siri features in iOS 18.4, but the first iOS 18.4 beta is expected as soon as next week, and it appears Siri won't be ready in time.
Apple has already promised that Apple Intelligence will be available in new languages in April, suggesting that's when the iOS 18.4 update will launch, so Apple has a limited amount of time to get Siri ready to go. Some features may now need to be postponed until May later, with Apple perhaps planning to introduce them in an iOS 18.5 update.
Apple has promised three Apple Intelligence features for Siri, including personal context to better understand and respond to requests, the ability to do more in and between apps, and on-screen awareness to respond to requests that involve content the user is looking at. Employees testing the new Siri features have reportedly said that they are not yet working consistently.
Major new features rarely come as late as May, because Apple typically transitions to working on the next-generation version of iOS in June after WWDC.
Gurman says that Apple could still debut the features in iOS 18.4, but turn them off by default as testing continues until iOS 18.5, and in that case, we'd still see the new functionality in iOS 18.4. We should be getting the first iOS 18.4 beta soon, though it is not likely that Siri will be in the initial beta given today's report.
Article Link: Apple Intelligence Siri Overhaul Could Get Delayed
If the 16 series misses out on the promised AI functionality in iOS 19 because they claim it needs the latest phone, I can see this is a fair point of view. As it stands though, the 16 series of phones will still get the updated Siri - however it's delayed.
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I, for one, would like to learn the juicy personal details. But seriously, knowing the details of what's gone wrong with Siri since shortly after its introduction can be useful information for people who want to learn how not to manage teams poorly.
I mean if the summaries worked I guess that might help, I don't trust it to decide what to ping me about and what not (everything with a date/time in it gets marked as time critical, like confirmation of my annual dermatologist appointment a year from now was scheduled got marked time critical!?!?. Spell checking and/or speech-to-gibberish is a total joke not even meeting the quality of Word 1.0 days' spellchecker. I can't tell you how often the speech-to-text will generate gibberish, not just pick a synonym like the wrong "there/their" fine, I would accept that grammar error (not happily, but I get it). But when it "fixes" a word (fix as in what the vet did to your cat!) into simply random UTF-8 characters that really isn't helpful, my favorite is when it leaves a single letter on its own (only "I" stands alone, "P" does not) but then ironically if I am pasting code to ask a buddy it might complain about a single letter in my pseudocode like if x > 7 might get flagged. It's just terrible UX and QI.
Apple: Just fix Siri!
That would be a huge step forward!
That would be a huge step forward!
This is Apple in a nutshell. Good hardware that's let down by the rubbish software, and the worrying thing is they seem hell bent on making it worse rather than taking the time to fix it.
🤔
Whilst not technically incorrect, it is misleading. I guess they could have shipped just image playground and claimed that Apple Intelligence was available... It's not great to sell your latest product on functionality that isn't yet really ready though, is it? Especially if it isn't really going to be ready until the next model phone comes out.
What's the marketing for that going to be. Hello, Apple Intelligence RC? 😂
On a side note, from the carrier advertising I've seen a lot of it is influenced by Apples own marketing.
It seems to me that this was always going to be the most difficult part of all of this based on Apple’s announced roadmap and the leaks that have come out so far given what we know and has also been leaked about Siri’s current state.
Mainly that the Siri’s code base is an old, bad joke internally at Apple and should’ve been re-written if not 5 or more years ago then certainly in the wake of ChatGPT which was announced back in 2022.
Haven’t we been hearing for years now that it takes weeks to make even the smallest enhancements to Siri? When Apple does make changes they sure seem not to work at nearly a high enough success rate.
I’d rather forgo any new “Apple Intelligence” features than see even another few months of a delay in the release of a re-written AI engine over a couple of new bells and whistles that demo nice in a controlled environment but won’t make a difference in the end.
Is anybody really thrilled by the second coming of Animoji via Genmoji (a feature I’ve yet to even bother with) or a barely working Image Playground with all of the potential fun removed from it via its own built in limitations in the name of “stoping AI manipulated image abuse” on top of bugs in what is there or would you rather have had Apple working on an LLM based AI engine with a focus on user privacy and on-device processing where possible and a users own internal AI cloud for devices that don’t have the components needed to support Apple Intelligence? Use Apple’s servers to start with on those devices without the processing power to get it done with an eye on offloading those requests to another local Apple devices you own on the same LAN if the device in question doesn’t have the processing power with Apple’s one servers as the final backstop?
Mainly that the Siri’s code base is an old, bad joke internally at Apple and should’ve been re-written if not 5 or more years ago then certainly in the wake of ChatGPT which was announced back in 2022.
Haven’t we been hearing for years now that it takes weeks to make even the smallest enhancements to Siri? When Apple does make changes they sure seem not to work at nearly a high enough success rate.
I’d rather forgo any new “Apple Intelligence” features than see even another few months of a delay in the release of a re-written AI engine over a couple of new bells and whistles that demo nice in a controlled environment but won’t make a difference in the end.
Is anybody really thrilled by the second coming of Animoji via Genmoji (a feature I’ve yet to even bother with) or a barely working Image Playground with all of the potential fun removed from it via its own built in limitations in the name of “stoping AI manipulated image abuse” on top of bugs in what is there or would you rather have had Apple working on an LLM based AI engine with a focus on user privacy and on-device processing where possible and a users own internal AI cloud for devices that don’t have the components needed to support Apple Intelligence? Use Apple’s servers to start with on those devices without the processing power to get it done with an eye on offloading those requests to another local Apple devices you own on the same LAN if the device in question doesn’t have the processing power with Apple’s one servers as the final backstop?
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I just laughed so, so hard. But I disagree with people who say there is no point to Siri. I find her very useful for setting timers on the Watch, although admittedly yesterday’s ‘thirty minutes’ turned magically into thirteen. Apart from that… yes, that would be it.
Apple can’t innovate Intelligence, my ass! – Siri
Apple can’t innovate Intelligence, my ass! – Siri
Given the reports that Apple’s “fixer” has been deployed to the Siri / Apple Intelligence team, I think Apple is under no illusions that Siri is good enough. Why this wasn’t done the second Apple leadership first saw a demo of ChatGPT though, I’ll never understand.
daringfireball.net
Apple Moves Kim Vorrath to Siri / Apple Intelligence Team
Link to: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-24/apple-enlists-company-veteran-kim-vorrath-to-help-fix-ai-and-siri
daringfireball.net