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Some Apple Employees Have 'Concerns' About iOS 26.4's Revamped Siri

I have no idea how much of this is perception and how much is real, but I have fifteen HomePods around the house and get a LOT of exposure to Siri responses and how they change over time. Since iOS 26, I have noticed (perceived) a significant worsening in Siri performance. She misunderstands more things, has trouble differentiating household members, forgets accessories that clearly work in the Home app, and more.

It's incredibly frustrating to have something that is on the edge of good functionality begin sliding backward. I love that you can now say "Siri, ask ChatGPT a question," and then get a real response from the speaker, but so much basic functionality is now less reliable. I really hope they can get this right.
 
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Tenkaykev said:
Apple have almost certainly realised that the AI bubble is about to pop and doesn't want to throw good money after bad. By deliberately delaying the release of of Siri they will be in prime position to utilise the useful parts of ML and not squander resources on the vapour ware aspects.
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There is no AI bubble in the sense that AI will go away. There is a financial bubble because investors have FOMO and throw money at everything with AI in its name, but this has nothing to do with AI being the future. AI is a big change. People will just ask a personal assistant to do something for them instead of doing it themselves in multiple steps taking way more time. Just like when people started using a mouse as an input device.
 
It's interesting to see how Microsoft CoPilot Surface laptops are performing with the Snapdragon X Elite chip, which many higher-middle Chinese Android phones are using, along with Google's Gemini backing their own AI systems. CoPilot is a pretty good AI that I use with my Macs. Of course, I also have Gemini, ChatGPT, Duck.AI, Grok, and Lumo to help me out, or just to compare. What I don’t have is Apple Intelligence, and I don’t miss it at all.

Anyone using a Surface CoPilot Laptop?
 
SBlue1 said:
AI is not a gimmick. Maybe for you. In case you missed it AI is already used in a lot of companies. My company is using it. At first we were just experimenting. Nobody knew what it was good for. At first people just made the graphics and texts for presentations. We were encouraged to find use cases. Now after a good while people are coming up with things it can do that I didn't even think about. Like real useful time saving things, money saving things, efficiency things. And I am not talking about the CEO cutting half the workforce because he heard some AI buzzwords. I am talking about real time, effort and money being saved and new ideas being generated. And this is just my work experience with AI. I use it at home too. AI is not a gimmick.
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Most of what is being sold is very much a gimmick. Have a "virtual friend". Generate visual slop. Generate summaries from multiple sources or that will need to be manually error-check for hallucinations and will not actually save time when doing it manually. Generate a personalized emoji or avatar. These are gimmicks.

They’re all good examples of what Jobs referend to as „giving good demo” - they work well enough to look good in a demo/event, when highly stage-managed, but are too inaccurate or just too useless to actually provide any RoI.
 
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KurtWilde said:
To be fair what “AI” system is achieving those results yet?
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I find ChatGPT to be the best system for my personal private use. I can ask one thing with one single well defined prompt and it will get it done. I can do it too by myself but I would need to perform multiple tasks by myself, it may be boring and worst of all it would take me forever. There are so many things I asked ChatGPT and it was a true help. It helped me research, compare and suggest things when I wanted to buy something. Usually it takes me forever to research products the more money the cost, ChatGPT helped me save hours. Or it's really helpful with learning a new language. One simple yet very detailed prompt and you can learn in a natural and easy way just like having a private tutor. Or it helped my repair my Vespa scooter by telling me what to google for and what to input into YouTube to find a tutorial. It would have taken me hours to search scooter and bike forums and to google to find a solution for my problem.
 
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It’s normal to have concerns about a technology this powerful. Look at how many “former” employees of some of these AI companies talk in public about their concerns. I think the challenge for Apple is that they have a history of doing things so well when they release something, and they feel pressure to make this perfect. It’s not going to be perfect. it just has to be comparable to other current products, and then they can iterate from there.
 
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SBlue1 said:
I find ChatGPT to be the best system for my personal private use. I can ask one thing with one single well defined prompt and it will get it done. I can do it too by myself but I would need to perform multiple tasks by myself, it may be boring and worst of all it would take me forever. There are so many things I asked ChatGPT and it was a true help. It helped me research, compare and suggest things when I wanted to buy something. Usually it takes me forever to research products the more money the cost, ChatGPT helped me save hours. Or it's really helpful with learning a new language. One simple yet very detailed prompt and you can learn in a natural and easy way just like having a private tutor. Or it helped my repair my Vespa scooter by telling me what to google for and what to input into YouTube to find a tutorial. It would have taken me hours to search scooter and bike forums and to google to find a solution for my problem.
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That’s still knowledge/info stuff.

Even OpenAI is still just getting into the action/Agent stuff.

Apple is getting there with that info type stuff, their on device models are already in the Shortcuts app and the areas Siri will start using them in and what’s possible are getting clear. Apple just needs to finish building them in.
 
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I7guy said:
Who said they are letting it wither on the vine and not, let’s see, doing something else with the technology? Hence Apple may have gotten a lot of out this exercise.
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For sure Apple isn't. That Apple has recently invested $500 Billion to manufacture their own AI servers in their Houston factory, which will then be distributed across the country, speaks volumes.

The above will likely upset those who reflexively/perpetually believe Apple is stupid, their AI effort is a flop, and will immediately "turn it off" when it's on their iPhones.
 
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Wx_Man said:
At this point with botched rollouts of MacOS 26, iOS 26, iPadOS 26, the Glass UI update and the utter debacle of Siri, Apple is in real danger of becoming in some ways of being looked at like Intel. An aging tech behemoth who makes some of the best slideshows and presentations on new technology but utterly fails to execute on the promised technology those slideshows present time after time.
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Agreed. iOS 26 blows so badly nobody is buying the iPhone 17 and it’s the worst selling iPhone line in iPhone history … oh wait…

supergt said:
There's a $50 iTunes gift card with your name on it once the inevitable class action lawsuit settles.
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Unless you’re a partner with the law firm who’ll bring in millions in revenue. 😉
 
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I just need Siri to only listen when I press the button 🤬 including after it answers a question. The "Press Side button for Siri" does not help. When it listens after answering you, you might be reading it's answer aloud and it can falsely think you are asking a new question and clear the screen it's showing you. So annoying. Feedback filed. When I opt-in on a setting I mean it. /rant
 
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The Game 161 said:
Can’t believe this site made an article from a one word line from Gurman which tells us nothing. On a release which is 6 months away!!!

Talk about running out of article ideas
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This. What an absurd article. Start talking off the record to any large engineering team and you'll find someone who thinks they're smarter than their boss-- then to take that one word summary about a product far from completion from a source with marginal credibility himself and create an article about it is ridiculous.

We're seeing more articles written in a way that stirs controversy rather than inform. The EU charger article was another example-- The EU has a law that you have to offer the product without a charger, and Apple sells the product without a charger in the EU. Those are absolutely related. The fact that Apple could do something expensive, troublesome and wasteful to give you a charger anyway isn't the point. The law also doesn't say they can't send someone round to your house once a week to clean your screen free of charge, but nobody expects that.
 
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The Game 161 said:
Can’t believe this site made an article from a one word line from Gurman which tells us nothing. On a release which is 6 months away!!!

Talk about running out of article ideas
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It really is a bunch of nothing.
 

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KurtWilde said:
That’s still knowledge/info stuff.
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But that's what people want Siri to do and Apple just can't pull it off. Siri has zero knowledge and zero awareness and is just plain stupid and dumb. It's limited because of privacy and it's limited because Apple is not serious about it. Apple should put major recources into developing Siri and it should also ask the users how much privacy the user wants. They can do it, I mean they preinstall Google as the primary search engine so I should be able to specify which AI engine I am fine with using.
 
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SBlue1 said:
But that's what people want Siri to do and Apple just can't pull it off. Siri has zero knowledge and zero awareness and is just plain stupid and dumb. It's limited because of privacy and it's limited because Apple is not serious about it. Apple should put major recources into developing Siri and it should also ask the users how much privacy the user wants. They can do it, I mean they preinstall Google as the primary search engine so I should be able to specify which AI engine I am fine with using.
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Their models are there ready, they’re in Shortcuts, they’ve pulled it off. They’ll add it to Siri.
 
turbineseaplane said:
Oh boy..

Last time there were "concerns" leaking out, Apple* pushed out the Vision Pro flop.




*well, in reality, Tim Cook personally forced it out hoping for his own iPhone moment
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So you define something that made Apple >$2.1bn in sales compared to Meta <$600m a flop, that's an interesting perspective? As for the leak rumour that "some of Apple's software engineers have "concerns" about the overhauled Siri's performance". Could this be more vague as it could just mean that they want it to perform a response quicker, no meat on the bone as they say?
 
SBlue1 said:
AI is not a fad. We are not talking about 3DTVs or curved monitors. AI is a monumental change how people interact with computers. Like the change from typing in commands and moving a cursor to pointing to folders and icons with a mouse.
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No kidding. It’s like dumb phone users round two. Or that partner at my firm in latter 90s that looked at me like I was nuts saying why do we even need a website. Show me how it’ll pay off.
 
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chmania said:
Apple Intelligence ≠ AI

AI is Artificial Intelligence that evolves and learns over time.
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We don’t see that. All the ai talk we see is machine learning. Identifying patterns. We’re years or decades from true ai.
 
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