Last week, in a classic Friday news dump, Apple announced that it would postpone plans to inject sound assistant Siri with AI-powered capabilities. However, this announcement not only issues stock prices. This also spirals the morale within Siri’s team, according to a new Bloomberg report.
According to internal notes on Apple’s issue, Robby Walker, senior director of Apple’s Siri division, held a full-hand meeting for the team and admitted that things weren’t great. He admitted that team members could be angry, embarrassed and burned by the whole situation. “You may have colleagues or friends or family members asking you what happened but it doesn’t feel good,” he said.
Apparently, the fact that Apple’s marketing is a bit of a messy thing that makes people on Siri hang out and it’s not good either. They started running ads to promote the features of Siri last year and guaranteed it will arrive by June this year. These features were supposed to be part of a wider suite of Apple Intelligence products, one of the main selling points of the iPhone 16 that otherwise didn’t offer a lot of upgrades. But now those are not coming.
In fact, there seems to be no clear timetable, when they actually arrive. Walker reportedly told the team that while Apple hopes their new intelligence features will be available this summer with the launch of iOS 19, it “doesn’t mean we shipped it at the time.” Currently, Bloomberg reports that the Siri feature in progress can only work in the way it should be between two-thirds and 80%, which sounds bad, and if you have any experience with Siri, it’s in line with the way it’s already running.
While it is painful and awkward to miss the deadline, maybe the Siri team should feel comforted, as most people may not be so much missing from those promised features. A December 2024 Trade Journal survey found that 73% of iPhone owners found that the company’s new AI features “little worthless”.
That said, voice assistants like Siri Kinda seem to be powerless to apply for artificial intelligence. Surprisingly, it took a long time for the company to really integrate it. Apple is not alone in this issue. It wasn’t until last month that Amazon announced its Alexa voice assistant as AI-powered features, and those features became slower even when the company temporarily introduced it to limited devices. For all hype AI will come about, it seems that it is finding ways to get consumers to use it more difficult than it seems.
