- 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- Apple has withdrawn related advertisements and added disclaimers on its website, citing extended development times.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.
Anyone who isn’t completely high from huffing AI brainfarts saw this coming.
Marketing over promising and making it developments problem. A tale as old as time.
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.
they should embrace it and be the anti AI tech giant
There stock would fall. I don’t care but investors would fear Apple is missing out on the future.
Hell, if they genuinely do that, I might even consider switching sides.
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?
Honestly I don’t really want a smart context-aware Siri, I just want something I can give simple, straightforward voice commands to, and get predictable, reliable results.
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
It’s been theorized that Amazon is progressively making all Alexa devices worse so they can sell you on a subscription based AI version.
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
Terrible voice assistant. I preferred Google assistant, but even that is becoming slow.
They neutered Google Assistant because it was costing too much money. Now it’s ass.
They’re likely also winding down development in favour of their new LLM, which certainly isn’t going to help matters.
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
Mm. Siri doesn’t do information lookups in the sense that I mean. It resorts to “here’s something I found on the web” very very quickly, and that’s not very helpful.
Fair enough. It’s not going to summarize results or anything. I’ll give chatGPT that one. But this is also where chatGPT can easily pull wrong information into the summary. If the “here’s something I found on the web” isn’t accurate, the topic is likely to have the AI summary screw it up too. In which case you’re better off manually searching and filtering results yourself.
Hallucination exists but is massively exaggerated in popular discourse about AI. The worst examples of all time are paraded and amplified, meanwhile people use these tools successfully every day. I’ve spot checked results and not ever really gone wrong. I do prefer the tools that provide links to their sources though.
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.
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.
does anyone buy a product for AI or Assistant features?
Some people bought scam pins/portable assistant that is actually a butchered phone thing, so, yeah.
Tech bros and “influencers” don’t count. We’re talking about real people. All of those devices failed because no one other than those seeking to ride the bleeding edge of technology actually are interested. The most anyone want Siri or Google Assistant to do is set alarms, set appointments, and pick-up/hang-up the phone when you’re on speaker. Sometimes it’s nice to ask it to do a search but the original versions of these did that fine until they started “improving” them with “AI”.
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.
Better yet, ask the AI to do it.
An AI age in software development will yield massive returns to anybody who makes it to “senior designer-developer” by the end of this decade, IMHO, if only because the totally fucked up unmantainable code bases made by “automated junior developers” will much more quickly reach end of life (the point were it costs more to try and fix/upgrade them than to rewrite them) and need to replaced (and the way to do that is to reverse engineer the Software Requirements from the existing apps an then build from scratch something new that satisfies those requirements, something which LLMs are entirelly unable to do).
We just had a town hall with our CEO and they came right out and said we need to simultaneously add AI and not add AI to our products, because customers are both excited and nervous about it. Our competitors are putting “AI” everywhere in their marketing, while we’re just trucking along making a quality product.
Our software works in a very dangerous environment, where mistakes could cost millions in damage and potentially risk human lives. So the end user just sees “AI” as a liability. But the decision makers as to what product to use are removed from conditions on the ground and respond well to marketing BS.
We actually do use AI with some parts of the product (e.g. curve fitting on past data for better predictions), but we need to be very careful about how we advertise that.
It’s dumb. Just pick the product based on what fits your operations best, don’t pick based on buzzwords…
Our software works in a very dangerous environment, where mistakes could cost millions in damage and potentially risk human lives.
I mean attorneys don’t seem to have a problem submitting case law that AI hallucinated.
I don’t fucking want AI in my phone, so take it out and be done with it.
You’ve had AI on your phone for ages. All your pictures are “AI” touched. And no you don’t want the raw output cameras in phones are not that good.
I was just fine without voice assistants and such. I especially don’t want LLMs being shoved down my throat at every turn.
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
‘It’s still in development’ doesn’t strike me as “dire.”
Dire as in, it was supposed to ship 6 months ago as the highlight of the iPhone 16 series.
Dear god!! The end is nigh!!
When it falls into false advertising in every market that the iPhone is sold, it is.
“Taking personal accountablility”, but not a paycheck.
