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

The issue is that large language models are absolutely terrible for what Apple wants Siri to do.
Alexa+ recently launched making a lot of the same promises and it, in many circumstances, performs significantly worse than the old simple command system.
It’s significantly slower, it frequently doesn’t understand what you mean, and it is chatty to an annoying degree.
Also it’s abilities to search across the web for information has been diminished, I get more “I don’t know that”’s from the new Alexa+ than I did the original, or the current version of Siri for that matter.
They are also just simply by their nature more unpredictable.
So of course Apple has employees who are worried.
 
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mrgrdn said:
I couldn’t care less about this news or rumor from Gurman. How could you have an opinion when nothing is done yet, and the release is in 6 months
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The Siri version to be released in iOS 26.4 is already being tested, and the testers are voicing concerns about that version. Sure, there’s still time to change things, but also not that much if there are fundamental issues with the current version.
 
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Gosh I hate this no news gossip journalism "Some Apple Employees Have 'Concerns' About iOS 26.4's Revamped Siri. However, he did not provide any specific details about the shortcomings."
 
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jz0309 said:
It's his job, he makes seemingly a decent (good probably) living if it, gets fed some info from Apple, some from supply chain, gets fed wrong stuff and makes things up... got to put it in perspective, sometimes he's right, sometimes he's wrong...
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I don't have an issue with him releasing that.

It's that people on tech forums eat up the "information" like it has been passed down from heaven on stone tablets. Which for me is really amusing.
 
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smulji said:
My point is the dot-com bubble popped, but the Internet is still around and stronger than ever. The AI may pop, but AI as an important technology will stick around
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Yes, of course, the bubble is a financial bubble, not a technological / innovation bubble.

But, just is in the 1990s, the business world jumped on the internet, everyone has to have a website ( even if that website has no function at all ), the website industry is getting massive investment - and that all collapsed. All the unwieldy "not built for purpose" websites were seen, after the fact as a huge waste of money, with little to no return on investment. They were replaced with the web we have now, which is far more function based ( ie.e web-based apps and productivity / SMS systems ).

AI itself (or whatever new term will be used for the technologies once the term "AI" becomes investor-toxic) isn't going anywhere. But this raft of ChatGPT chatbots, AI SAAS and slop generation will collapse. It'll hurt Google, Microsoft, Neta etc, but it won't kills or cripple them. But it will cripple the legions of "AI companies" that are essentially all offering more or less the same thing, which is a thing that is not generating a viable RoI.

I honestly think the second wave of AI (which we'll probably get with the years, but an after this first wave bubble bursts) will not be chirpy assistants or virtual friends. The models will be smaller, local, and will be doing a lot of very boring, simply tasks well, rather Han trying to do performatively complex tasks badly.

Trying to emulate humanity with AI is a dead end, because we already have lots of humanity. I want better dynamic power management and dynamic increemtbal backups that backs up essential data when needed, rather than on a fixed schedule. These are the type of boring, little tasks that AI will end up be focused on. And there'll be no "song and dance" about it.

AI in 2025 is like websites in the 1990s - In your face, flashy, impossible to ignore, but not very good at actually doing anything or adding value for the customer.Genrating AI slop is not adding value to anything.
 
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klasma said:
The Siri version to be released in iOS 26.4 is already being tested, and the testers are voicing concerns about that version. Sure, there’s still time to change things, but also not that much if there are fundamental issues with the current version.
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How do you know that? Sure, it's being tested like all SW is being tested. For all I know Gurman used the term "some SW engineers", not testers... so to assume these were test engineers is just as much a rumor as the "article" in discussion
 
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I7guy said:
Or it won’t. These are all opinions. Frankly I think Apple will achieve its goals of ai integration with a privacy focused aspect of it.

“History” tells us nothing of the sort.
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History tells us that evolutionary instinct that headsets like this don’t work long term and will continue to be the case.

There is a simple reason why Siri is not great & yet had a head start & it’s the exact same with AI in relation to apple
 
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Rafagon said:
Maybe the new features will be out before GTA 6 comes out!
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Lol, GTA 6 doesn't exist. I am sticking with AI creating those trailers for it because they refuse to release the game after 4329039230 years.
 
They lost crucial members of their AI team to rivals, they’re rushing to meet deadlines, they had lawsuits and fines piling up, and they’re reorganizing the company. Somehow I don’t blame them.
 
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jz0309 said:
How do you know that? Sure, it's being tested like all SW is being tested. For all I know Gurman used the term "some SW engineers", not testers... so to assume these were test engineers is just as much a rumor as the "article" in discussion
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Oh jeez
because the individuals who he has been speaking with are more than likely with the revamped Siri on their devices because apple do actually work a bit ahead.
Like some devices will have features from iOS 27 on them already
 
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I7guy said:
As an aside, Vision Pro may be a flop to you, but Apple you can bet, got a lot out of it and doesn’t consider it a flop.
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We’ll know they’re discontinuing it when they drop vision Pro recording from the iPhone. Just like they dropped 3D Touch from future hardware and then disabled it on existing hardware.
 
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Hey girls and boys…could I ask a favor from you all? Ever since the news broke that there are big problems with Siri after all of Apple’s top AI engineers have left for Meta could you all help me find my “Shocked Face”? I’ve seem to have misplaced it over all the news of buggy and badly engineered OS releases from MacOS to iPadOS all the way to the disaster that is Siri.
 
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Wx_Man said:
Hey girls and boys…could I ask a favor from you all? Ever since the news broke that there are big problems with Siri after all of Apple’s top AI engineers have left for Meta could you all help me find my “Shocked Face”? I’ve seem to have misplaced it over all the news of buggy and badly engineered OS releases from MacOS to iPadOS all the way to the disaster that is Siri.
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I think a guy named Pikachu took it.
 
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