Report Reveals Internal Chaos Behind Apple's Siri Failure

[Minato1990]

Tim Cook is a bum. A total and complete bum this is all on him. Like Next Gen Car Play, Siri still being dog **** and a total failure with Apple Intelligence. Its one thing announcing things that aren’t ready, but another to NOT HAVING DELIVERED ON SAID THINGS!

Steve Jobs would’ve kicked all these bozos dirtying up the Apple name to the curb.
WAKE THE **** UP TIM.
STEP DOWN AND TAKE THESE BUMS WITH YOU!

Like the fact you have your own employees presenting Apple intelligence at apple stores is insane behaviour. Presenting an unfinished product, and they have to basically say to wait on it for the better features. Like what the flying hell is that??!!!

Apple is dying and that incompetent bozo Tim is straight up killing it!

 

[sofila]

There seems to be a real hatred of Apple amongst the terminally online. I don’t see it in real life, except among the most stalwart PC/Android types who still cling to the old Mac/PC Holy War. And it all seems to be over silly little chatbots.

Very often people disappointed by Apple are mistaken for haters, while I think that the greatest damage to the reputation of Apple itself has been done by those who have always defended it regardless, finding a thousand idiotic justifications. The story of Siri (14 consecutive years of being below expectations) and the wave, especially in these forums, of people who said "it works well for me" is exemplary

 

[maszaikasza]

Will someone with knowledge on the topic please educate me?

What properties exist in current open-source models that are at odds with Apple's privacy vision? Is there a theoretical way for Apple to employ a good, open-source model while simultaneously satisfying their own vision? The available models seem good - even a slightly knocked-down version would be better than what they're working with today.

Maybe someone already replied but for my understanding, Apple, as usual, wants to make everything on-device. Which for LLMs is going to be a disaster. You need hundreds of gigabytes of RAM and another hundred GB of storage to make any model generate clever answers in a rational amount of time. It doesn't matter if it's Apple or OpenAI model, if it's "mini" version or anything. Even the smallest LLM models are huge both in terms of local storage and memory it needs for calculations. These things are not for smartphones yet.

 

[SBlue1]

Absolutely NOT. Privacy is far too important to compromise.

We are living in a world where governments are trying their hardest to snoop in on your activity.

Privacy is FAR more important and useful than AI/ML ever will be.

Well let the users decide.

 

[Bungaree.Chubbins]

Very often people disappointed by Apple are mistaken for haters, while I think that the greatest damage to the reputation of Apple itself has been done by those who have always defended it regardless, finding a thousand idiotic justifications. The story of Siri (14 consecutive years of being below expectations) and the wave, especially in these forums, of people who said "it works well for me" is exemplary

Disappointment makes sense for people who find talking to their phone a useful or necessary function. I fully agree Apple should be working to improve Siri, if only because it makes the iPhone more accessible to people with physical limitations.

Personally, I detest talking to my devices, and I always have. Back in the 90s, I was so excited about new dictation software. I got a microphone and the software, and discovered I hated it. It wasn't the clunkiness, I could have worked with that, it was a realisation that talking to your computer was just a clunky, awkward, inefficient method of operation. And it just feels so dorky!

All that is to say that while I don't care about Siri, I do see the need for its improvement. I don't see the need for such anger-fuelled ranting that we're seeing on this forum, though.

 

[Contact_Feanor]

This is mind blowing incompetence. Jobs would have been livid over this.

Of course he would. And we know that because he shipped MobileMe.

 

[Ralfi]

Every day I’m reminded of how bad Siri is.

Me: “Siri, how long will it take me to drive to Windsor?”
(I’m in Melbourne, Australia)…

Siri:

 

[neotint]

Given how many creators use Mac products how Apple handles LLMs and their, to date, inherent basis on massive copyright violations could be an existential risk to their brand. Apple has the ethics and money to lead the LLM world in a much wiser ethical and responsible direction. "Do whatever it takes" is incredibly foolish advice and strategy for a brand like Apple that in many ways is the antithesis of techbro libertarian culture. Becoming more like Musk/Altman is how to kill Apple.

 

[Runaway Train]

Fat, lazy and rudderless - living on past glory. Nothing new here, this has been going on for some time now …the « trash can / can’t innovate my arse» debacle, Touch Bar MBP, Vision Pro flop, dumping MagSafe only to bring it back. Once a marketing North Star, Apple have recently shown us such Emmy award-winning masterpieces as the Mother Nature skit, and the iPad « crush » video. Software? The conversion of Logic into a Garage Band Pro beats machine, mothballing Aperture then later buying Pixelmator to plug the gap they themselves created, emoji’s as « showcase innovations » worthy of frothy proclamations at WWDC. Their very own Steve Balmer / iPhone moment for AI, « LLM’s nawh, who needs that »? Visionaries. The list goes on but that’s enough sadness already.

Steve Jobs was a once in a generation individual, what he did was exceptional, we just need to accept that. Today? Read above, the first sentence. Stick a fork in them. They’re done. It was good while it lasted.

 

[Fraserpatty]

"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 is insane. How can you have this be your output and keep your job.

This and adding new voices. Every time Apple announced a new voice, but no significant Siri improvement I wanted to throw my iPad up against the wall.

 

[Scott6666]

This was a problem LONG before ChatGPT. Many years ago, I considered writing an email to Tim Cook because it was clear that eventually competitors' superiority in regard to Siri was going to become a "siri"ous problem. As Alexa, Google, etc were becoming increasingly capable, Siri was becoming a joke in equal measure. That should have been Apple's first warning to get cracking. It was clear that as the other assistants became more powerful, it could sway buying decisions. Anyone could see from the movie HER how valuable a voice assistant could be. I didn't take out the time to send that email, and I regret it. I don't think it would have changed anything, but it would be nice to have it now just to show, "hey, I tried to warn y'all."

It's pretty obvious that Siri became low-to-no priority, having never really advanced much beyond its introduction. I understand that its development might have been hampered by Apple's privacy stance - and I'm grateful for those protections, but they really needed to find some way around that limitation rather than just shrugging and moving on.

On the plus side, I think Craig Federighi gets it, and I'm hopeful there's still an opportunity for Apple to catch up to a meaningful degree before this leaves them in serious trouble. (Deepseek is proof that work can be done quickly in the AI space.) When Tim cook does step down, I'm really hopeful they hand over the CEO reigns to Federighi. We shall see.

(Oh, and P.S. I wouldn't ignore quantum computing or robots either if I was Apple, speaking of potentially disruptive tech.)

Of course I never use either the Google or Microsoft voice assistants. Alexa is not much more than a joke and I don’t even remember what Microsoft’s is called. My echo dots are in the garage.

 

[vantelimus]

This is pretty damning and disappointing. It is consistent with what you would expect to happen in a company that has gotten full of its own success.

Some Apple employees are said to be optimistic that Craig Federighi and Mike Rockwell can turn Siri around. Federighi has apparently instructed Siri engineers to do "whatever it takes to build the best AI features," even if that means using open-source models from other companies in its software products as opposed to Apple's own models.

Federighi is in charge of software and was the guy asleep at the switch. Do people really have confidence in him? It kind of doesn't matter what he tells engineers to do if the culture he has created is "overly relaxed" and abides "AIMLess" groups.

 

[coachingguy]

Whoever is REALLY taking this over and it’s their PRIORITY… Better start flying the Pirate Flag… If you know, you know

 

[MRrainer]

“Senior leaders didn't respond with a sense of urgency to the debut of ChatGPT in 2022”

This says it all. Unbelievable to overlook the significance of this.

But yeah, also some folks here still do not get it.

Well, I use it exclusively to ask it programmer questions. If I didn't need those, it'd be useless to me.
(Though grok3 is even better at that).

So, I can imagine that if you don't do that and don't use it for useless party-tricks like writing poems in a certain style or drawing fantasy-pictures - it might actually look useless.

 

[novagamer]

Fat, lazy and rudderless - living on past glory. Nothing new here, this has been going on for some time now …the « trash can / can’t innovate my arse» debacle, Touch Bar MBP, Vision Pro flop. Once a marketing North Star, Apple have recently shown us such Emmy award-winning as the Mother Nature skit, the iPad « crush » video. Software? The conversion of Logic into a Garage Band Pro beats machine, mothballing Aperture then later buying Pixelmator to plug the gap they themselves created, emoji’s as « showcase innovations » worthy of frothy proclamations at WWDC. The list goes on but that’s enough sadness already.

Steve Jobs was a once in a generation individual, what he did was exceptional, we just need to accept that. Today? Read above, the first sentence. Stick a fork in them. They’re done. It was good while it lasted.

I wouldn’t count Vision Pro out yet. I think the product is an absolute disaster and releasing it to the public and not a developer kit + incentivizing developers is Tim Cook’s greatest product failure of his entire tenure, but give it until 2032 before calling it dead. I truly think they have a long-term plan that may or may not pan out, and I say that really disliking the current one.

I believe Steve Jobs killed Aperture development and they kept it on life support until an OS couldn’t run it any longer. I can’t find the source for that now but I very distinctly remember seeing it and being shocked because he loved photography and hated Adobe.

It is well documented that he tried to kill off their entire pro apps sector but was talked down thank God, Logic is selling a lot of high-end Macs to audio people and Final Cut has improved radically since the disaster of a launch X was.

I hope we get a Photomator Aperture reboot, I used it until I no longer could and only really loved Lightroom on the iPad.

…

This article is correct about “utility” of LLMs for non-nerds. It’s a product that should never have been released to the public, none of them are good enough and Apple’s implementation of summaries is straight garbage. I think they should put a lot of money toward advancing the frontier level research, which they are doing if you pay attention to papers coming out, and being specific about what parts to integrate into the products.

“AI” such as it is curently could help a lot with being a layer in between voice recognition and passing requests off to Siri in a form it always understood and was able to answer.

 

[Robert.Walter]

“Senior leaders didn't respond with a sense of urgency to the debut of ChatGPT in 2022”

This says it all. Unbelievable to overlook the significance of this.

But yeah, also some folks here still do not get it.

In 6th grade I learned: “Every loser had underestimated the competition.”

 

[vantelimus]

Aside from quick search answers, small AI isn't really going to help most people. An LLM on a phone is also going to need several gigabytes of memory and run really, really slowly. Not exactly the most efficient use of power.

The most efficient use of power is doing what the user wants done. So, if the user wants the advantages of an on-device LLM, that's what someone will provide. I don't agree that the LLM must be slow. Smaller models, like StableLM 2 Zephyr 1.6B run acceptably fast on the iPhone 16 under the Private LLM app. Sure, someone can criticize it by saying at 8-bit quantized Llama 3.3 70B on running locally on a Mac with 128GB is better. But, that's not really the right way to look at it. The name of the game is to fit enough function into the phone to make it a product the mass market will buy. Speed won't be the issue. The trade off between memory and function will be for the near future.

 

[macMD]

aimless hot potato 😂 rename Siri to Ivy & slap on a British accent. at least it will sound sophisticated while being useless.

I use the Irish accent now and it’s more enjoyable for maps at least. Siri pops up when I don’t say Siri. When I try to use it in my car it doesn’t work most of the time. I have to press the button on my phone. Subaru used to connect Siri Handsfree in the car but took it away in my current Subaru.

Siri is less functional and a horrible failure after 15 years.

 

[appleCakes]

This choice cost Apple dearly. Steve Job’s definition of a bozo.

Apple Leadership - John Giannandrea

John Giannandrea is Apple’s senior vice president of Machine Learning and AI Strategy and a member of Apple’s executive team. Learn more about John.

www.apple.com

 

[HiRez]

Burn it to the ground and start over. I don't care how many resources have been poured into it so far, it's almost a complete a failure. 10+ years and the only thing Siri can do semi-reliably is set timers (and even that doesn't always work). Apple's stumbles in AI and natural language processing go back many decades, to at least the Newton in the mid-1990s, if anyone even remembers that.

The Simpsons: Eat Up Martha

I have a lot of confidence in Craig Federighi (probably should be the next CEO), hopefully he can really shake it up.

 

[thebart]

Like other said, Apple's focus on privacy is another roadblock for creating a great GenAI Siri.

People keep saying this but what is the evidence or rationale for it. What personal data did open AI use. Didn't they just mostly scrape publicly available data. Are you saying Apple is so scrupulous they refuse to do that?

 

[tutubibi]

I once worked for a international company that put an engineer at the CEO post. Things went downhill from there for the employees and the company. Many mis-steps, lost money, etc. We still made more money then God but a lot of bad decisions were made. Wrong man for the job, he was great at engineering and working at that level...but we never had any confidence with him as a CEO.

The same with Mr. Cook, great at what he did, but it is time for him to gracefully bow out and for the BOD to select someone who does not look like a Silicone Valley Ken Doll, but select someone that has an artistic eye and creative spirit backed by an MBA.

I agree with most of this but Apple's problems are result of MBAs (or MBA mindset) calling shots.

 

[Robert.Walter]

Absolutely agreed. Of course, with bad leadership and marketing along - it’s beyond ridiculous announcing features before they’re ready (or existing).

Not only that, but we’re talking about features which everybody knows are hard to build and can’t be done overnight.

Generally, I’m not sure why people are surprised by what happened. Many of the AI features introduced throughout other apps are mostly gimmicky and not really helpful. I never believed what was showcased during WWDC will materialise in a year.

many fast follower players in the auto industry got sucked into getting out over the tips of their skis on autonomous vehicles because early players who have still failed to deliver on their promises (AP/FSD, etc.) were overshadowing them by out-showcasing them.

I wonder if this is what happened to Apple with AI. (Oddly Apple woke up and hit the brake on Apple Car but failed to mash down the accelerator on AI).

 

[Rogifan]

John Gruber posted this excerpt:

Other resentments also built up. Some in the software engineering group were annoyed by the higher pay and faster promotions their colleagues in the AI group were receiving. And they were bitter that some engineers in the AI group seemed to be able to take longer vacations and leave early on Fridays, while they faced more-punishing work schedules.

Distrust between the two groups got so bad that earlier this year one of Giannandrea’s deputies asked engineers to extensively document the development of a joint project so that if it failed, Federighi’s group couldn’t scapegoat the AI team.

It didn’t help the relations between the groups when Federighi began amassing his own team of hundreds of machine-learning engineers that goes by the name Intelligent Systems and is run by one of Federighi’s top deputies, Sebastien Marineau-Mes.

Why is Giannandrea still at Apple?

 

[Rogifan]

This is pretty damning and disappointing. It is consistent with what you would expect to happen in a company that has gotten full of its own success.



Federighi is in charge of software and was the guy asleep at the switch. Do people really have confidence in him? It kind of doesn't matter what he tells engineers to do if the culture he has created is "overly relaxed" and abides "AIMLess" groups.

Federighi wasn’t previously in charge of Siri or AI.