Apple hunts for program manager to help respond to Siri criticisms

Apple is searching for a Siri engineering program manager to keep tabs on how the world is reacting to the AI assistant and transform any criticism into real-world improvements.

The listing specifies that a the ideal candidate will lead a program to "monitor what the world is saying about Siri through social media, news, and other sources," and subsequently provide "product analysis and recommendations to stakeholders and leadership," a job listing indicates. Second is "facilitating Siri engineering support and guidance to ensure the success of Apple Marketing campaigns, press events, product announcements, and launches."

Candidates must have prior experience working on assistants, and familiarity with "sentiment analysis," including tools like Sprinklr and Meltwater. Education requirements are comparatively light, demanding only a bachelor's degree, though Apple prefers a masters degree.

Siri is typically considered weaker than Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant even though it predates both. The latter two have a wider range of supported skills and smarthome accessories, and are often better at answering general knowledge questions without mistakes or resorting to Web links.

Apple is presumably looking to address the situation by responding to specific complaints. It's facing an uphill battle, since the company's strict privacy policies mean that it can't rely as heavily on cloud data and integration.

Where possible the company has turned to on-device machine learning technologies, which can suggest actions to take in familiar circumstances, such as navigating home at the end of the workday.

Some recent changes have included the availability of more apps with Siri Shortcuts, and upgraded British and Australian voices. A little over a month ago Apple removed its Siri team leader, Bill Stasior, as part of a change in overall strategy.

51 Comments

fotoformat 302 comments · 13 Years

About 5 years ago

Yeh, initially they asked Siri about the job position... but didn't come up with an answer!

jdgaz 406 comments · 9 Years

This is really pretty stupid. 1) Have Siri recognize the voice that is asking information of it. 2) use that voice to determine which device will be used / queried for information 3) Allow multi queries without the repeated "hey Siri". Answer questions with answers not web site lookups. Start there and you are on your way to a winner.

Latko 398 comments · 7 Years

jdgaz said:

This is really pretty stupid. 1) Have Siri recognize the voice that is asking information of it. 2) use that voice to determine which device will be used / queried for information 3) Allow multi queries without the repeated "hey Siri". Answer questions with answers not web site lookups. Start there and you are on your way to a winner.

While you’re quite right, this immediately translates into serious complexity on a lower level. When Apple acquired Siri, it didn’t adopt the architecture designed by the original developers - translating into a lack of modularity and scalability.
Apple figured it could do better, but on the contrary, from that moment the project went into patchwork. As it now has become apparent that they failed in a big way, we see various flavors of spin reaching press, like they would buy other speech synthesis engines, start over from scratch, or anything else that might cover up the disaster at hand.
Appointing big names for truckloads of money is the last resort of that wrong kind.
Geniuses can’t integrate truckloads of incompatible systems and thereby can’t repair what troublemakers have done before.
Siri has become the same frivolous mixture of various technologies as Project Titan, without any clue or strategy how to integrate it into a product

Notsofast 450 comments · 8 Years

The way the article is written is confusing some readers obviously based on the comments thus far. This is not an engineering position; it's a marketing position. The person is supposed to work with social media to see what folks are saying and communicate that back to others so they have that input and so they can coordinate marketing messages.

Also, the article skims over the entire comparative capability question and merely repeats an internet meme about Siri being behind. In truth, the situation is much more positive. I am a heavy user of Siri, and have family members who have Alexa and Google in their homes. ALL three have a long way to go, but in contrast to the author's comment, recent tests have shown Siri to be ahead of Alexa and getting close to Google in terms of accuracy.

As far as "skills" that is true in absolute numbers, but it is misleading. Yes, people have written thousands of "skills" for Alexa, but surveys show most people haven't used a single one of them. In contrast, surveys show that Siri does pretty much everything most people use their smart assistants for, as does Alexa and Google. Yes, someone has written a skill for Alexa so she can fart on command, but it turns out people use things like smart speakers to: play music and podcasts (#1 reason), check weather and traffic, check and send messages, make and listen to phone calls, set timers and alarms, and control their home automated devices. ( Believe me, Siri on the Homepod's audio quality and listening ability in noise, blows away the low quality Amazon and Google products)

Again, Siri is still in the infant stage, but so are the others, and it will be great to see what Apple does with their acquisitions like Vocal IQ, but in the meantime, Siri is the most used digital assistant in the world, and knows more languages by far, and what is glossed over by almost all writers is that you aren't sacrificing your privacy to use Siri.

Macsplosion 29 comments · 8 Years

Notsofast said:

The way the article is written is confusing some readers obviously based on the comments thus far. This is not an engineering position; it's a marketing position. The person is supposed to work with social media to see what folks are saying and communicate that back to others so they have that input and so they can coordinate marketing messages.

Also, the article skims over the entire comparative capability question and merely repeats an internet meme about Siri being behind. In truth, the situation is much more positive. I am a heavy user of Siri, and have family members who have Alexa and Google in their homes. ALL three have a long way to go, but in contrast to the author's comment, recent tests have shown Siri to be ahead of Alexa and getting close to Google in terms of accuracy.

As far as "skills" that is true in absolute numbers, but it is misleading. Yes, people have written thousands of "skills" for Alexa, but surveys show most people haven't used a single one of them. In contrast, surveys show that Siri does pretty much everything most people use their smart assistants for, as does Alexa and Google. Yes, someone has written a skill for Alexa so she can fart on command, but it turns out people use things like smart speakers to: play music and podcasts (#1 reason), check weather and traffic, check and send messages, make and listen to phone calls, set timers and alarms, and control their home automated devices. ( Believe me, Siri on the Homepod's audio quality and listening ability in noise, blows away the low quality Amazon and Google products)

Again, Siri is still in the infant stage, but so are the others, and it will be great to see what Apple does with their acquisitions like Vocal IQ, but in the meantime, Siri is the most used digital assistant in the world, and knows more languages by far, and what is glossed over by almost all writers is that you aren't sacrificing your privacy to use Siri.

These are the sort of ideas I’d imagine Apple wants their prospective appointee to convey.