The company’s top executives are taking “intense personal accountability.”
  • 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  • Apple has withdrawn related advertisements and added disclaimers on its website, citing extended development times.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.
  • JcbAzPx@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    19 hours ago

    Marketing over promising and making it developments problem. A tale as old as time.

  • roguesignal@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    19 hours ago

    Siri is so useless. All these years and I use her to basically set timers and reminders.

  • intensely_human@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    23 hours ago
    • Take screenshot of screen
    • Send screenshot to Claude 3.7 or any other decent chatbot. Even GPT-3 is light years smarter than current Siri, but I don’t know it if can analyze images
    • Run Claude’s response through a text-to-Siri-speech layer

    There, now Siri can see your screen. Why can’t Apple accomplish this? Why are megacorps so inept?

  • flop_leash_973@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    23 hours ago

    This whole thing is a textbook example of how bad shady marketing today and can really cause you a lot of pain tomorrow. If Apple had not been so quick to let PR write checks their ass was not ready to cash the conversation around Siri would still just be the casual jokes about it sucking, and not more serious public blackeyes.

  • drperil@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    24 hours ago

    Ok… this is what it is I suppose, every business wants to be on the AI train, but, this seems like an opportunity to make the next iPhone, or at least a version of it, without AI as a selling point.

    I’d be very happy indeed to have an option that was entirely devoid of, and incompatible with, any form of AI and I know I’m not alone in that. Sell it as prioritizing privacy or respecting consumers desire to opt out, whatever the marketing folks come up with. But that would be my next phone in a heartbeat.

  • midori matcha@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 days ago

    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?

    • AA5B@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      1 day ago

      Interesting timing, where I’m seeing the opposite. All my Amazon devices suddenly can’t turn on a simple light switch, and one appears to have somehow factory reset.

      However Siri works perfectly. I use a button rather than wake word, but then it dies actually turn on my light

      • fishy@lemmy.todayEnglish
        0·
        23 hours ago

        It’s been theorized that Amazon is progressively making all Alexa devices worse so they can sell you on a subscription based AI version.

        • AA5B@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          22 hours ago

          Maybe, but they may lose more customers than they expect ….

          There are privacy based devices for “always listening” voice assistants coming on strong

          I already use Siri with a button for a lot. recently it seems able to recognize more of my smarthome devices and it will now prompt to forward more complex queries to ChatGPT

          I’m really down to the intercom feature being the only reason to keep Alexa - I can’t control the devices my kids use at their mom’s house

  • ofcourse@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    2 days ago

    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:

    1. 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.
    2. 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.
    3. I hope marketing gets reigned in so they won’t push other unready features the next few years.
    4. 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.
    • JuxtaposedJaguar@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      2 days ago

      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.