Report Reveals Internal Chaos Behind Apple's Siri Failure

[ThomasJL]

None of this would've happened if Tim Cook hadn't fired Scott Forstall. Yes, Siri was problematic when it was launched as a part of iOS 5 in 2011, but if Cook hadn't cluelessly fired Forstall in 2012, Forstall, being the perfectionist he is, would've seen to it that Siri get fixed and continues to lead the industry.

 

[I7guy]

None of this would've happened if Tim Cook hadn't fired Scott Forstall.

If it happened once under forstalls watch it could happen again.

Yes, Siri was problematic when it was launched as a part of iOS 5 in 2011, but if Cook hadn't cluelessly fired Forstall in 2012, Forstall, being the perfectionist he is, would've seen to it that Siri get fixed and continues to lead the industry.

Maybe not, hypotheticals are fun to play.

 

[surferfb]

None of this would've happened if Tim Cook hadn't fired Scott Forstall. Yes, Siri was problematic when it was launched as a part of iOS 5 in 2011, but if Cook hadn't cluelessly fired Forstall in 2012, Forstall, being the perfectionist he is, would've seen to it that Siri get fixed and continues to lead the industry.

Seeing as Scott Forstall was the first head of Siri inside Apple, and Siri’s (original) failure is often cited as part of the reason he got fired, I’m not entirely sure that’s true.

 

[surferfb]

Maybe not, hypotheticals are fun to play.

In that hypothetical world Jony Ive quits in 2012 because he (reportedly) couldn’t be in the same room as Forstall anymore. The Apple Watch ends up being a triangle-shaped abomination and is still a running joke in that world’s 2025.

 

[GuruZac]

While Apple has undoubtedly dropped the ball, I can’t help but wonder is it even possible to get Siri up to speed with other virtual assistants with AI given the much stronger stance on privacy?

 

[GuruZac]

Because exhausted people produce such quality work.

As a medicine resident, I’d welcome a 60 hour week!

 

[GuruZac]

This is proof Apple could be BlackBerry’ed in the future if it doesn’t catch up with the rest of the industry.

In the smartphone market, the iPhone is certainly years behind Android flagships. Battery tech, charging speeds, multitasking capabilities, virtual assistants/AI, design.

 

[johnsawyercjs]

I'd be curious for a macrumors poll on who uses Siri daily, weekly etc.

I never use it and neither does my wife, my 11 year old will on occasion. I dont know many others who do.. just seems like a gimmick still

One of the main reasons many people don't use Siri is that it's been so badly executed and maintained. If Apple had kept it in working order, if nothing else than to make it work for just about everyone in nearly all situations, as was Apple's claim, at the same level of consistent functionality as a relatively few people are still able to wring from it, then more people would be using it, but the frustrations with its inconsistent behavior have pushed away a lot of people, both those who have tried it and those who have heard the stories about it.

While maintaining Siri's normal functionality is a good baseline yet to be met, Apple should also have expanded on its functions. It wasn't intended to be a chatbot at first, and not for about 11 years into it, since it was introduced in Feb 2011, and ChatGPT came along in 2022, but added functionality for Siri didn't have to wait until chatbots were released.

 

[nekton1]

Is this Apple's Nokia/Blackberry moment? The beginning of the end (a long end, no doubt) for Apple? Falling behind at a crucial moment such that it will never catch up while other big tech and start ups leave Apple in the dust? It has enough cash to buy it's way out of this, but we haven't seen any good moves lately, only fumbles. What's going on?

Hotdogs carrying briefcases (genmoji and other cartoon crap) is what's going on.

 

[johnsawyercjs]

What value is there that the free ChatGPT app doesn't address?

Siri wasn't originally intended to be a chatbot. That's a goal that was grafted onto it only upon public release of ChatGPT in late 2022. Siri's original main functionality, which for about 11 years wasn't supposed to be dependent on an LLM, was to have knowledge of your personal data across multiple apps, and the ability to pull in other data, to allow you to tell it to set schedules and appointments, pluck relevant data out of your emails, coordinate flight arrivals to allow you to meet someone at an airport, plan your trip to the airport and other trips, control some Apple products and appliances, etc. It can do many of those things, but so inconsistently for many people that they can't rely on it. ChatGPT can't currently do many of those things since it doesn't have access to your personal on-device info.

 

[Expos of 1969]

I actually have a Pixel 9 Pro coming tomorrow and have been de-Apple’ing my life for about a week now from Macs, iPads, ATV, etc. It’s hard but Google Gemini looks so good (don’t care about chat bots) and having been in the ecosystem for 15yrs and upgrading ever year on about every device I’m bored of the Apple repetitiveness. Apple used to take forever with software but when they did something it was better than the competitors…hasn’t been that way for years now. Apple hardware was always top notch but others have caught up as well.

Only issue I see with the Pixel Pro is some potential stuttering while scrolling and the fact my spouse might be upset cause I switched even though with RCS she may never notice if it wasn’t for the colored bubble. Guess we’ll see!

Please let us know how your transition goes.

 

[Chungry]

In the smartphone market, the iPhone is certainly years behind Android flagships. Battery tech, charging speeds, multitasking capabilities, virtual assistants/AI, design.

Thats all true. I want Apple to be better but I'm not funding their efforts on the phone front again until they figure it out.

 

[rp2011]

Siri wasn't originally intended to be a chatbot. That's a goal that was grafted onto it only upon public release of ChatGPT in late 2022. Siri's original main functionality, which for about 11 years wasn't supposed to be dependent on an LLM, was to have knowledge of your personal data across multiple apps, and the ability to pull in other data, to allow you to tell it to set schedules and appointments, pluck relevant data out of your emails, coordinate flight arrivals to allow you to meet someone at an airport, plan your trip to the airport and other trips, control some Apple products and appliances, etc. It can do many of those things, but so inconsistently for many people that they can't rely on it. ChatGPT can't currently do many of those things since it doesn't have access to your personal on-device info.

Good point.

 

[Dancin-Ted-Danson]

What's strange is that Scott Forstall got the boot under Tim Cook for releasing Apple Maps in an unfinished state, yet as far as I can tell no one senior has been shown the door for the Apple Intelligence failure or the Apple Car failure (look at how well the Xiaomi SU7 is doing in China to see how well a tech company can do whenthey enter the EV market).

I think Apple have time to pull this around, given noone has yet made hardware with a fully integrated LLM/AI, but I suspect this may not last much longer.

Common misconception reported by apple rumor sites to my understanding. The flip side of that rumor (internally, but I am long removed) was that Tim really disliked Scott because of his attitude, and Scott was a threat (he was much more of a Jobs-like "product focus, only my way makes sense" mindset). There was also the assumption that if Steve had held onto the company longer, Scott would have been the future head of the company. There was also a group internally who were ride or die from the team perspective with Scott. Tim didn't like it and used Maps as a way to shove him out... remember, Scott was pushed out because of Maps, when a few years before that, Scott's old boss told the world, "You are holding it wrong," when the iPhone 4 had drop issues.

Personally, I was hopeful Tim could pull this off... but the Tim pick was John Scully all over again. Just like last time it took time to land there, and the momentum of the company (and culture) helped push it forward... but even when I was leaving I was starting to see that culture shift happen, so I'm not totally surprised that the Siri team sat there like "WTF" and where told to hit the dates after. Something something about B players hiring C players...

 

[neotint]

But do they have that ability? If you train your LLM on only material where the copyright has expired, that is published in 1929 and earlier, would it still be useful? If it turns out that the courts decide training LLMs is not fair use the resulting thud in AI company valuations will be epic.

I have to say though an AI spitting out information in the manner of Evelina, or Emma, or Well at World's End would be interesting at the least. There would be a lot of horse and carriage metaphors.

I’m all for steampunk LLMs! 🚂… but Apple could literally also pay for use of quality content which solves the problem. DeepSeek and Nvidia are showing bigger isn’t better. Smarter methods on higher quality content is better than mountains of crap like Reddit and scrapes from all corners of the Net and all the filtering requirements to balance that. GIGO.

 

[dblackwood72]

Remember how Steve responded to the MobileMe failure? That’s what’s needed now.

 

[delsoul]

Remember how Steve responded to the MobileMe failure? That’s what’s needed now.

Exactly, but it’s the shareholders that need to do it to Tim Cook. This constant mess at Apple is simply unacceptable at this point. Tim Cook gets pass after pass for screwups. This Siri situation is that much worse for it all

 

[lk400]

I heard everything I need to know about the Siri team when I read the article that reported that after all of the negative press, (I believe) the head of Siri met with the team to tell them that Siri was the best product out there, that the negative press doesn't reflect them, and that they should all feel good about themselves (paraphrasing, obviously). There is a time for that kind of message, and there is also a time to light a fire under people and get them singularly focussed. Being worried about negative press and job security would be a great motivator. Having your boss tell you that the **** product you work on is the best is not much of a motivator at all.

 

[lk400]

>One of Walker's pet projects was removing the "hey" from the "hey ‌Siri‌" voice command used to invoke the assistant, which took over two years to achieve

This also tells me a lot. Did anyone even want this? Do people use it? I tried it and found it no more convenient than hey Siri. Also, felt awkward to change. After a week of effort, I just went back to hey Siri. I turned "Siri" only off in an attempt to make my home pods more sensitive again (they barely respond anymore) but this didnt even help. Now im stuck with unresponsive home pods for a feature I don't want and don't use.

 

[SebCohen]

Apples privacy is a joke, they'll give your info to any government that needs it. Whats the point in not putting in Ai tools to look through your data? Can't they just blacklist a bunch of words for the more personal stuff, and just feature it as a business tool and not a keep track of your personal life tool? its all the non personal stuff that clogs my computer up. If that junk could get figured out for me I would have more time to organize my one personal files.

THATS a good thing. The government protects us and we as members of a society give up some of our freedoms to be part of that group. Police can search you when you’re driving a car. But they all need to follow the rules. The more they bend those, the less people accept their powers. It’s a balance.

 

[johnsawyercjs]

If anyone wants yet another example of how unreliable even a high-end LLM like ChatGPT 4o can be, exacerbating Apple's dilemma in trying to somehow "mix" one into the already-unreliable Siri, here's one.

Tonight I asked ChatGPT to tell me about skylight flashing for a roof, to make it watertight. It gave me some good answers text-wise, but then it offered to create a diagram of the various parts of a skylight's flashing. The diagram was almost OK, but it lacked several details, and its legends pointing to the various parts were wrong, identifying part of the flashing as asphalt shingles, and vice versa. I told it about this, and it offered to make a new, corrected diagram. The second was no better, except that one of the legends did point to shingles:

This is currently what always happens when ChatGPT supplies an incorrect image, and then you ask it to give you a corrected image--the "corrected" image is no better, and in many cases even worse. My guess is that after Apple initially downplayed the usefulness of LLMs, that at some point they became overly enamored of them, hoping that in addition to using LLMs to help Siri perform the basic tasks that its original developer demoed back in 2010, that LLMs would also allow Siri to do more advanced tasks like chatting and creating diagrams like this, but Apple soon found, after devoting resources, that while LLMs could create text chat replies fairly well, they couldn't do it consistently enough (at least for Apple), and the abilities of LLMs at creating accurate images (as opposed to cartoon images) is far worse, and so Apple had to back off their plans for incorporating LLMs into Siri for either purpose.

 

[Jeeve Stubbs]

I have been a Mac person for decades. This blatant lie and misrepresentation sealed it for me. I'm going to transition to non-Apple products. And I don't care what the fan boys say. I was a professional programmer, unix, IBM... Stability and consistency is what I want. Apple is no longer it.

Windows nowadays is just as good as macOS. Notwithstanding personal tastes, each has some advantages over the other, but by and large, these are two great systems. If I absolutely had to choose, I would basically recommend macOS to non-geeks, and Windows to geeks.

 

[BigDO]

The move from live to fully prerecorded keynotes has enabled this. Pre-2020, if a feature wasn't in a usable state, it couldn't be shown because the demos were live. Now, they've gotten way too comfortable with the ability to literally fabricate features and say "We'll get it working later." There's no sense of urgency to get things done.

Go back to live keynotes.

Exactly this. This is why I don’t even bother wasting time watching “keynotes” (they are not - keynote is a live opening speech to a gathering).

Use one of the actually capable AIs to summarize the contents without wasting an hour watching Apple SVPs pat themselves on the back.

 

[Jdizzle188]

The slipping in the software at Apple has become somewhat of a constant, UI bugs and glitches just left for release after release, updates pulled or bricking devices, hell the most recent was the AirPods Max firmware!

I've said this aswell before I think Apple doesn't seem to have any seasoned developers, it's evident with the keynotes, flashy features that just work or UI elements that sometimes come across as a mess.

Maybe I'm wrong but the culture aswell is playing a part in this.

 

[skippermonkey]

Siri is crap. Even the stupid ‘Siri’ name is crap. Fortunately I don’t need it as I can read, write and do my own research. I’d rather have an Apple car to be honest.