- Apple’s progress with Siri and artificial intelligence has been slow, and features promised in June remain delayed.
- At a Siri team meeting, senior director Robby Walker acknowledged the frustration within the team, describing the delays as “ugly.”
- Features like Siri understanding personal context and taking action based on a user’s screen are still not ready and may not make it into iOS 19.
- Challenges include quality issues that caused these features to malfunction up to a third of the time and conflicts with Apple’s marketing division over showcasing incomplete features.
- Apple has withdrawn related advertisements and added disclaimers on its website, citing extended development times.
- Senior executives, including Craig Federighi and John Giannandrea, are reportedly taking personal accountability for the delays.
- Walker emphasized that the team’s work is impressive and that the delayed features will be released once they meet Apple’s standards.
Apple Intelligence hasn’t been much better than old Siri on unsupported devices.
For a third of the time, she has a hard time recognizing the trigger word the first time (usually “Siri” rather than “Hey Siri”), and not perform my commands when all I want her to do is act as a voice-activated light switch.
What exactly is the trillion dollar company struggling with here?
I can careless for Ai Siri. There’s no real need. I barely use Siri anyways.
I think the phrase is “I couldn’t care less”.
I only use it for voice controls.
AI isn’t the answer. Plain and simple.
LLMs aren’t the answer. *
LLMs are the question, “no” is the answer.
they should embrace it and be the anti AI tech giant
Hell, if they genuinely do that, I might even consider switching sides.
I don’t fucking want AI in my phone, so take it out and be done with it.
Right? Hink of everything else I can do with that space and computing power. Not to mention the fuckin environmental devastation we’d curb.
Siri has run locally since iOS 15
A while ago I set up a Siri shortcut that opens ChatGPT in voice mode. Now I can just say “hey siri, ask the demon” and in a moment start talking to ChatGPT with no further commands and zero buttons pressed throughout. It answers in voice mode.
This is pretty useful for things like doing units conversions while my hands are sticky during cooking, or just doing simple information lookups while my hands are busy. I use ChatGPT responsibly, never trusting it for things that aren’t one-dimensional information retrievals and summarization. It works great for me for like 50-60% of the things I used to Google. Internet search is, once again, just for finding websites, like it should be.
What’s my point? We don’t need Siri Apple Intelligence to ship. There’s already something better. And it runs on my iPhone 14, which isn’t even compatible with Apple Flatulence.
I’ve never used Apple intelligence and Siri alone has done a fine job for unit conversions, info lookups, and most any other things. No need to fire up chat GPT for those basic uses
Apple fucked up no doubt. Given how hard they pushed AI as a key feature of IPhone 16 I wouldn’t be surprised if they get a class action lawsuit for this.
But it’s also interesting to read a few things from the article that makes me hopeful for when Apple finally releases the features:
- Let’s be honest, AI by Google, MS is shit right now. They are claiming the same promises which most of the time don’t work, but Apple chose to delay release until they could get better consistency.
- The executives are taking personal responsibility? I hope that’s the case and no developers are thrown under the bus for this. I’ve rarely seen an article mention personal executive responsibility from a tech firm for delays and qa issues.
- I hope marketing gets reigned in so they won’t push other unready features the next few years.
- I hope Apple releases some open source AI tooling to re-gain good will. Would love to see some more competition in the AI space.
I hope Apple releases some open source AI tooling to re-gain good will. Would love to see some more competition in the AI space.
That’s literally never going to happen. Closed-source proprietary stuff is their MO.
Anyone who isn’t completely high from huffing AI brainfarts saw this coming.
AI is overrated in almost every implementation that isn’t scientific research. The buzzword stock hype machine fake growth cycles are going to kill the tech industry.
these features to malfunction up to a third of the time
That’s “ai” for you lol
Dropping rapidly, and using reasoning models can solve most of it today.
Features like Siri understanding personal context and taking action based on a user’s screen are still not ready and may not make it into iOS 19.
Tech companies not understanding exponential complexity is one of the funnier things to come out of recent years.
I don’t want that on my phone. I just want a dumb program that sets alerts and schedules, I don’t want it interpreting information and I doubt most people really need that function on a phone.
Yeah, but smartphones have stopped offering anything new. I recently upgraded my 8-year-old device, and I hardly notice any difference. I bet other customers see that too. They are desperately trying to find the next big thing. It’s astonishing, however, that all these companies completely ignore the fact that their customers don’t even want AI features.
But but but . … they’ve spent Hundreds of Billions of Dollars on this!!! You HAVE to buy it!!! Noooooooooo
The whole industry is a shit show right now with the “AI race”
I don’t want to be a software developer anymore because it’s become a permanent deathmarch toward the next buzzword.
Maybe your boss can develop software all by his or her self now lop.
baffles me why anyone supports a company that’s a decade behind their competitors
I don’t care how far behind they are with AI because I don’t want AI on my phone anyway.
If they know Siri’s shit then why can’t I have my power button back?
Could you explain? I have never turned Siri on, but my power button works as normal.
If Siri is enabled, then the default behavior of long-pressing the power button brings up Siri instead of turning off the device. IIRC you can disable that behavior without having to disable Siri, but there’s no way to set the “action button” to open Siri; if you want a Siri button, it needs to be the power button.
Would be nice if any voice assistant actually did what I asked.
