Malcolm Owen
The long-delayed overhaul of Siri was hit by repeated failures to progress, with leadership problems making it harder to execute than it should've been.
In March, Apple admitted that its attempt to make Siri more personalized and up to date was far behind schedule. It confirmed that there were delays in getting Siri to the state where the company wanted it to be, and that it would be sorted out in the coming year.
Since that rare admittance from Apple, the company has done what it can to fix the situation. This included a managerial reshuffle, pushing John Giannandrea out of the top Siri role in favor of Mike Rockwell.
It was a major event in a situation that was extremely embarrassing to Apple. However, the entire affair is something that could have been avoided, reports The Information, had Siri not fallen victim to poor leadership choices.
Siri hot potato
Multiple people who worked in the AI and software engineering groups within Apple told the report that conflicting personalities were a problem. Some, who worked under the AI and machine learning group under Giannandrea said that poor leadership was at play.
The sources also identified Robby Walker, who worked under Giannandrea, as being one of the reasons for the issues, due to an apparent lack of ambition and willingness to take risks on future Siri designs.
The employees also referred to Siri as a "hot potato" within Apple, due to it being passed between the different teams over the years. With the latest reshuffle putting Siri under the oversight of software boss Craig Federighi, they have some hope that favorable changes will be made.
A lengthy Siri issue
The problems getting Siri modernized started years ago, in 2018, when Giannandrea moved from Google to work on Apple's new AI group. At a time when Siri was beginning to stagnate, Giannandrea took an interest in managing the digital assistant.
Before then, engineers working on Siri felt as if they were second-class citizens with Apple, with frustrations that the software engineering team's control over iOS updates failing to prioritize Siri fixes. Those software engineers also felt the Siri team weren't able to keep up with new features being developed in the group.
Giannandrea's plan was to make Apple's own AI-based voice assistant, using a playbook he gleaned from Google. He believed Apple had to get better training data, and to do better at web-scraping for answers.
However, when urged to shake up Siri's leadership, he declined to do so.
Walker's safe work
The lack of risk-taking by Walker was a problem, the group of sources added. It was believed that Walker downplayed efforts to swing for the fences, and instead worked on other less meaningful metrics.
This apparently included celebrations of small wins, like reducing the response time for user queries. His work to remove "Hey" from "Hey Siri" also took more than two years to pull off, with little actual real benefit in the end.
Walker also dismissed one attempt in 2023 for one team to use LLMs for Siri to gain emotional sensitivity, such as to detect if a user is in distress. He said he would rather focus on the next Siri release instead of committing resources to the effort.
That team still went away to work on the project via the software engineering group's safety and location team, without his knowledge.
Increased tension
The software engineering group and the AI team had a dysfunctional relationship, with respective leaders Federighi and Giannandrea having dramatically different managing styles.
Resentments also built up over difference in pay, the speed of promotions in the AI group, and vacation periods.
Eventually, Federighi's groups started to mass together hundreds of machine learning engineers to work on its own models, separate from the main AI team. This included building demos to voice-control apps without Siri, which the Siri team didn't appreciate.
An attempt to introduce voice control systems for apps on a headset that would become the Apple Vision Pro was also problem-filled. Hostility between Walker and others in the group, as well as the slowness of the Siri group in general, became a big point of friction once again.
When ChatGPT was released in 2022, the AI group didn't respond with any real urgency, the engineers claim. By contrast the software engineering group were far more interested, with demos presented to Federighi of what could be accomplished.
Eventually, Apple's managers said in 2023 that engineers couldn't include external models in Apple products. But, the responsibility to build the models was the responsibility of the AI group.
They also apparently didn't perform as well as OpenAI's offerings, employees explained.
The current shakeup
Despite years of issues, the current situation where the Federighi-controlled software engineering groups would oversee the AI work led by Rockwell should be a fruitful one for Siri's progress.
Federighi is viewed as having more knowledge of technical details than many under his control. He has also told Siri's machine learning engineers to do whatever they need to make the best AI features, even if it's using open-source models from other companies.
Meanwhile Rockwell, who has a good track record in the company, is viewed as someone with vision, which Walker certainly lacked.
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William Gallagher
Andrew O'Hara
Wesley Hilliard
Marko Zivkovic
Chip Loder
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19 Comments
"Among members of the Siri team at Apple, though, the demonstration was a surprise. They had never seen working versions of the capabilities, according to a former Apple employee. At the time, the only new feature from the demonstration that was activated for test devices was a pulsing, colorful ribbon that appeared on the edges of the iPhone’s screen when a user invoked Siri, the former employee said.
In other words the demo was faked and Siri had no such capabilities. It's good to see Federighi jump in and taking point, particularly with relaxing privacy focus just a tiny bit and allowing
Giannandrea came from Google, but he was never trained to think the Apple way. One of the reasons Apple worked so well for so long is because it thought different — a mindset Steve Jobs instilled deeply in the company. That way of thinking shouldn’t be assumed; it must be taught. If Apple wants to keep its soul intact, it needs to train new people in the culture that made it great. Hope they will learn from it.
Well, it's the usual. It takes failures at a few levels for situations like this to arise.
Cook never should have structured the org such that AI and software are separate organizations. AI, ML and LLM algorithms seem pretty intricately tied to software. If there needed to be a Siri service owner, it should have been Product Marketing (Joswiak)? Then, Giannandrea was not good at his job. This is me looking from the outside. Maybe he was a good leader, but his org hasn't been very productive. I don't know who's responsible, but my experience with the software keyboard has not been good. It's been passable? At times, its key tapping performance and word prediction performance has regressed. That's an ML task that was under Federighi or Giannandrea? Either way, it's now an ML based keyboard that doesn't seem any better than the past.
Then, the overarching umbrella here is LLMs and chatbots. Everyone is desperate to create AI features. Most of them are of dubious benefit, but everyone has to be in the race. That's basically not Apple's MO, where they try to create beneficial features at their own pace. The company is in conflict with itself with AI. Not a good place to be.
It's hard to teach an old dog new tricks and Giannandrea is no spring chicken or recent college graduate. If there was a corporate culture mismatch then it is Apple's fault for putting him in his previous role. Apple has made mistakes before picking senior executives (Mark Papermaster, John Browett are two off the top of my head) who didn't fit the Apple Way.
Giannandrea had a good track record at Google so clearly he's smart. But being a great researcher is not the same as being a manager who will be rightfully judged by making product deadlines.
This isn't entirely Giannandrea's fault. Ultimately Apple failed in putting someone responsible for maintaining and improving Siri after their acquisition and now that hopping about the AI bandwagon is a top priority, a decade's worth of neglect has come back to bite them hard. Apple created their current conundrum by mismanaging Siri for years before they handed Giannandrea the torch.
They cannot fix Siri in a year and it's clear as day now.
My guess is they tried and belatedly came to the conclusion that they have to rewrite Siri from scratch to interface correctly with current and emerging AI technologies. This is far harder for Apple than most other companies because Apple has placed security and privacy as two pillars of their core values.
The peanut gallery who has been whining for years that Siri was falling behind the competition was right all along.
Someday Apple will put out a useful Siri but it will trail the competition for several more years. It's notable that Apple Maps has never caught up to Google Maps especially when you look at the two side-by-side in many places outside of the USA.