Apple Reassures Siri Team Members Feeling Disappointed and Embarrassed by Apple Intelligence Delay

[novagamer]

Siri was working well in 2010, but now she's a disaster.

Siri when it was just a standalone English-only text app before Apple bought it worked better on follow-up context than it does 15 years later. Unfortunately I don’t think many people used that version before it was shut down but at the time it really was amazing.

I remember being confused once it launched with Apple at why it couldn’t do what I had done with it a year prior. I thought they’d sort it out quickly, how naive I was.

At launch Voice Control worked better than Siri to call contacts. You could switch between them in setting for a brief period.

 

[9081094]

I mean 60% to 80% is leaps and bounds better than the 0% the current Siri gets right

You are exaggerating. That 0% should be 1% 😜

 

[TruthAboveAllElse]

This may be the first intentional leak I've seen soliciting sympathy.

As for the 60-80% accuracy for new features, I would love that with the features they shipped back with the original Siri like "Call Mary" which does not work 60-80% of the time.

Here's one from recently on my Apple Watch:

View attachment 2492163

Just one example, but there's random stuff like that that doesn't make sense all the time.

The most annoying for the last year or so is when I do "Call John" on my iPhone and for whatever reason it thinks I am saying my own name (let's say that's David) and it thinks I say "Call David" and it then proceeds to tell me it has no phone number for David—and yet my contact card certainly has my number.

They aren't delivering now what they were supposed to have delivered even pre-Siri with Voice Control back in 2009.

They're not delivering now what IVR phone systems delivered in terms of accuracy back in the 1990s.

This.

We are developing tech and trying to market it. Rather than developing products and seeing what tech is needed.

 

[chrono1081]

Lots of hostility in this thread towards the devs for no good reason. Yes I said “no good reason”.

Don’t blame the devs here, blame project management. Every time you see this kind of thing (and I’ve been part of this exact thing all throughout my decades long software development career) there is a team of developers screaming they need more time for development and a project manager saying “No.”.

Of course the devs are going to be discouraged. They’re working their asses off and unfinished work of theirs is getting released to the public to heavy scrutiny by people who aren’t going to be taking the backlash.

Anecdotal but to give you an idea how this kind of thing plays out my team was once given three months to implement something that should have been a year of development. We screamed we needed more time and our project manager said “Writing code is no different than writing an email, you get three months.”

Well the product shipped, it was awful and broken because it wasn’t enough time, and the development team got all the ridicule.

People don’t realize it’s not the developers making the timelines or over promising features.

 

[rappr]

This story makes it even more apparent that the culture of excellence is degrading at Apple.

The (in)famous MobileMe failure saw Steve Jobs berate the team, demand better, replace the lead executive on the spot, and so on.

Here, the leader of Siri is coddling the team, hoping they don’t feel bad and asking them to stay motivated?

Sounds like Apple is hiring the wrong type of people now. The people who worked for Jobs likely expected better of themselves if they failed. They also knew he wouldn’t stand for poor software experiences.

With this group, it sounds like Apple is afraid they might very well quit because of a little bad press.

Steve Jobs era Apple never tried to built anything this ambitious, to be fair. They just put out different colors and sizes of Macs and iPods.

 

[macfacts]

Why would the workers feel embarrassed, unless they try to "flex" and tell all their personal friends and family they work on Siri at apple.

 

[cliveren13]

So does this means that Apple intelligence should have been able to work on of the latest iphone from the 12 and up just like gemini on the cheapest android phone makes you wonder.

 

[GMShadow]

This story makes it even more apparent that the culture of excellence is degrading at Apple.

The (in)famous MobileMe failure saw Steve Jobs berate the team, demand better, replace the lead executive on the spot, and so on.

Here, the leader of Siri is coddling the team, hoping they don’t feel bad and asking them to stay motivated?

Sounds like Apple is hiring the wrong type of people now. The people who worked for Jobs likely expected better of themselves if they failed. They also knew he wouldn’t stand for poor software experiences.

With this group, it sounds like Apple is afraid they might very well quit because of a little bad press.

MobileMe was a product that shipped. The rework of Siri did not ship, they pushed the date because it wasn't ready.

Your comparison fails from the start.

 

[bob24]

Basically, he is 100% confirming recent comments saying that Apple’s problems are caused by a lack of accountability and increasing tolerance for mediocre performance.

 

[ace8cjc]

MobileMe was a product that shipped. The rework of Siri did not ship, they pushed the date because it wasn't ready.

Image Playground shipped, and that app, right down to the icon, is not up to Apple’s standards whatsoever.

 

[bousozoku]

They need a couple of 16 year olds with enthusiasm and programming knowledge. They need someone who isn't going to blindly follow the rules of the job and the project. They need mavericks.

They've had this problem with "the right way to do things" and that won't work when you need radical work done. For all of that BS that they put in their press releases from the 1970s, they haven't had anyone driving, pushing, clawing to new adventures.

 

[citysnaps]

I use Siri many times per day. Zero problems.

 

[vinsalducci]

The pearl-clutching overreaction over a delayed feature delivery timeline is simultaneously hilarious and ponderous. I work in AI. This is beyond common. And, a 60-80% success rate is pretty decent for a dev version of software.

Everyone relax. Go outside, take some pretty pictures with you iPhone. The world isn't ending...at least not because of this.

 

[Analog Kid]

I don't understand why there's a need for a senior director to acknowledge employees feeling angry, disappointed, burned out and embarrassed. If they did a poor job and didn't release a good product, they should feel that way - about themselves for the bad job they did. Then get right back at it, DO YOUR JOB and put out a good product.

It's embrarrassing nowadays how employees need to be cajoled to just do a good job. The low standards and coddling of entitled employees is leading to poor products. I assumed companies like Apple, google, etc. would be hiring the top 1% of employees available, which should be people who have both intelligence and a strong work ethic and a willingness to grind and get stuff done. But, I guess not. So many of these employees making hundreds of thousands of dollars putting out mediocre products and software.

I agree with your general sentiment, but I don't put the delays here on the employees. They were given an unrealistic timeline. ML projects can take a very long time between iterations. I also don't blame management for the aggressive timeline or high standards. They needed to light a fire under the team to move quickly. In the end I expect this will deliver better results faster than quietly turning the crank behind the scenes.

Personally I blame people like those around here who moan that they want more transparency from Apple but can't stomach the uncertainty of a high stakes, high technology development.

The team, as you say, should be professional enough to put their heads down and get back to work.

 

[fguerraz]

That is just such a planned “leak” lol
It’s a disguised press release that, because it was internal, have no accountability for. Perfect PR.

MR really deserves its name on this one: spreading rumours.

 

[Expos of 1969]

Don’t say “It’s coming” until you’re actually sure you can deliver.

Tip number 3 in the "How to be an Adult Film Star" handbook.

 

[flybass]

I use Siri many times per day. Zero problems.

Really? I’m very careful to start a timer with Siri rather than starting a stopwatch. The latter works only half the time.

 

[klasma]

Has anyone else experienced this? I have.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1900295347538452928

Yes, Apple Intelligence is known to fall for scams. Just google for it, plenty of posts and articles. Apple Intelligence apparently hasn’t read “How to identify fraudulent emails and messages” on https://support.apple.com/en-us/102568.

 

[breather]

They should fire the PR team for advertising stuff that’s not finished.

 

[brijazz]

Walker acknowledged that employees might be feeling "angry, disappointed, burned out and embarrassed" following the Siri delay

Or as Siri put it, "hungry, appointment, turned down and bare-assed"

 

[Makosuke]

I’ll just say that, while Apple dramatically screwed up and burned a lot of “we deliver what we say we’ll deliver when we say it’ll land” capital on the premature announcement and marketing blitz fiasco, from a user perspective I would much rather the feature shipped 3 years late than in the same janky, functionally insulting, or disturbingly insecure state that a lot of similar products are now or have recently gone live in.

I have tech-savvy co-workers who have resorted to comical hacks like swearing in Google searches just to prevent it from spitting out useless AI slop answers to technical questions, and Microsoft’s take on the same sort of thing Apple is trying to do went out to users as an absolute privacy and data security nightmare.

 

[antiprotest]

Apple should reassure customers and shareholders by firing all of these people and poaching those who have a proven record of developing and shipping AI software.

 

[needsomecoffee]

If there is a class action lawsuit, and it went to trial... Discovery revealing Apple's real internal emails related to Siri and AI might result in a good HBR study. Something seems very, very wrong with C-Level Apple Mgmt (who are very, very rich now). Why has there been essentially no change in the C-Level guys (90+%) guys in the last decade ?? Hard to believe keeping John G. running Siri for nearly a decade has proven worthwhile, yet here he is with a Director suggesting all is well. Yikes.

Hey Robbie... Maybe the team is demoralized because they have not been given the vision and structure needed to be successful.

 

[klasma]

Steve Jobs would have never. He would have lit a fire under them months ago.

Yeah, he probably wouldn’t have reassured them and said they can take some time off to recharge. 😂

(Not that I condone Jobs’ management style; just that thought was funny.)

 

[mxrider88]

Apple will ship the Siri functions when they're ready to launch, and the company does not want to provide the public with unfinished features, even if "competitors might have launched them in this state or worse."

Is he for real?
They have been shipping non working features for a decade now and he also has the guts to say other companies launched features in this state or worse??

Has he tried to use Grok or Gemini? Has he tried a pixel phone?

It’s shocking to read this stuff, seriously. They need a reality check!