Hartley Charlton at MacRumors has a recap of the new report in The Information about why Siri has remained so bad. Here are some of the bits that plainly make me angry, but not surprising the state of Siri today:

“Apple’s AI/ML group has been dubbed “AIMLess” internally, while employees are said to refer to Siri as a “hot potato” that is continually passed between different teams with no significant improvements.”

“Apple AI chief John Giannandrea was apparently confident he could fix ‌Siri‌ with the right training data and better web-scraping for answers to general knowledge questions. Senior leaders didn’t respond with a sense of urgency to the debut of ChatGPT in 2022; Giannandrea told employees that he didn’t believe chatbots like ChatGPT added much value for users.”

“Meanwhile, ‌Siri‌ leader Robby Walker focused on “small wins” such as reducing wait times for ‌Siri‌ responses. 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.”

“The report claims that the demo of ‌Apple Intelligence‌’s most impressive features at WWDC 2024, such as where ‌Siri‌ accesses a user’s emails to find real-time flight data and provides a reminder about lunch plans using messages and plots a route in maps, was effectively fictitious. The demo apparently came as a surprise to members of the ‌Siri‌ team, who had never seen working versions of the capabilities.”

“The only feature from the WWDC demonstration that was activated on test devices was ‌Apple Intelligence‌’s pulsing, colorful ribbon around the edge of the display.”

Talk about complacency opening the door to crisis, one would think the world’s richest tech company would not find itself in such a situation – but thats what complacency does. It happened to IBM, happened to BlackBerry, and even happened to Microsoft.

Siri has easily been the worst Apple feature the past decade, introduced with the iPhone 4s in 2011 and Apple just forgot about it. Whilst competitors that came after Siri have got much better and have provided much more utility. And that’s even before factoring in the AI revolution we’re currently experiencing. Add “artificial intelligence” and LLMs into the mix, and Siri feels like a lost cause. 

Just like the Apple Maps debacle over a decade ago, I hope Apple can turn this around and in a few years Siri reaches it full potential to other voice assistants and LLMs around. Tim Cook has been a great CEO filling the shoes of Steve Jobs. The iPhone is grown even bigger (and better), Apple Watch has been a hit and the Vision Pro is a technical marvel but Siri and Apple Intelligence leave a severe dent on his accomplishments.