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Apple's latest attempt to launch the new Siri runs into snags

136 points by petethomas 9mo ago

jammcq 9mo ago
Damn paywalls! Sorry, I shouldn't be so negative. I'd just like to be able to read the article.
retired_account 9mo ago
https://archive.is/2026.02.11-194917/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-11/apple-s-ios-26-4-siri-update-runs-into-snags-in-internal-testing-ios-26-5-27 https://archive.is/2026.02.11-194917/https://www.bloomberg.c...
louiereederson 9mo ago
[flagged]
tiffanyh 9mo ago
Do similar issues exist with Gemini on Android? Or are these challenges very Siri/iOS specific?
- shakna 9mo ago
  Gemini can and does send everything to Google. Apple's challenge is they want to maintain privacy, which means doing everything on-device. Which is currently slower than the servers that others can bring to the table - because they already grab every piece of data you have.
  - AnonHP 9mo ago
    > Apple's challenge is they want to maintain privacy, which means doing everything on-device. Apple is not trying to do everything on-device, though it prefers this as much as possible. This is why it built Private Cloud Compute (PCC) and as I understand it, it’s within a PCC environment that Google’s Gemini (for Apple’s users) will be hosted as well.
  - ComputerGuru 9mo ago
    This isn't planned to be exclusively on-device. Siri isn't exclusively on-device now, to begin with.
  - pjmlp 9mo ago
    No they aren't, that is why Private Cloud Compute is a thing.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
jdlyga 9mo ago
This is obviously a death march project. Just delay it indefinitely until the Google Gemini based Siri chatbot is ready. Why ship something half-assed?
- lysace 9mo ago
  The referenced Bloomberg source (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-11/apple-s-ios-26-4-siri-update-runs-into-snags-in-internal-testing-ios-26-5-27 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-11/apple-s-i...) says this about the delayed effort: But it’s been a complex undertaking. The revamped Siri is built on an entirely new architecture dubbed Linwood. Its software will rely on the company’s large language model platform — known as Apple Foundations Models — which is now incorporating technology from Alphabet Inc.’s Google Gemini team.
fartfeatures 9mo ago
This was such a self inflicted own goal. Siri has needed work for years and every year they neglected it. When they first bought Siri it was state of the art and then it just languished. Pulling an Intel and sweating your assets until it is too late is never a good idea.
- azinman2 9mo ago
  Siri has had many, many, many engineers on it for a while.
  - wronglebowski 9mo ago
    I don't doubt it, but what were they all doing? The Metaverse had 10k employees on it for multiple years and seemed to almost be a standstill for long periods of time. What do these massive teams do all day?
    - owlbite 9mo ago
      Have meetings to figure out how to interact with the other 9990 employees. Then try and make the skeleton app left behind by the team of transient engineers who left after 18 months before moving on to their next gig work, before throwing it out and starting again from scratch.
      - sockaddr 9mo ago
        Exactly. What Meta accomplished could have been done by a team of less than 40 mediocre engineers. It’s really just not even worth analyzing the failure. I am in complete awe when I think about how bad the execution of this whole thing was. It doesn’t even feel real.
        doctor_blood 9mo ago
        Actually I would like see a post-mortem that showed where all the money actually went; they somehow spent ~85x of what RSI has raised for Star Citizen, and what they had to show for it was worse than some student projects I've seen. Were they just piling up cash in the parking lot to set it on fire?
luxuryballs 9mo ago
Are Apple AI agent delays bearish for AI agents in general? Unless something else is the issue it’s normal behavior for Apple not to implement something everyone else already has until it’s very good and solid.
- barbacoa 9mo ago
  Apple wants to vertically integrate. Their AI strategy until recently was to develop their own LLM models that were small enough to run on device. But massive scaling is what makes LLMs so powerful, so all their internal models were terrible and unusable. Basically they bet that compute efficient LLMs were the future. That bet was wrong and the opposite came true.
- sigmar 9mo ago
  These aren't "agent" features. they're the features announced in 2024, like ai summaries in web search and natural language image editing
  - luxuryballs 9mo ago
    I think to a similar point, if Apple is so picky about it that it’s still not ready… it definitely tracks with my experience using ai, it requires my review and often bungles things, I wouldn’t just turn it over to my customer yet and trust it to be reliably high quality.
lacker 9mo ago
It doesn't surprise me that Siri continues to be bad - Apple's current plan is to use a low-quality LLM to build a top-quality product, which turned out to be impossible. What does surprise me is that Google Home is still so bad. They rolled out the new Gemini-based version, but if anything it's even worse than the old one. Same capabilities but more long-winded talking about them. It is still unable to answer basic questions like "what timer did you just cancel".
- paul7986 9mo ago
  Indeed especially compared to chatGPT running so much better on my same iPhone where siri shits the bed. Voice transcription sucks in every aspects on my iPhone except surprise chatGPT gets what I am saying 90% of the time.
- zmmmmm 9mo ago
  I can't even get gemini on my phone, configured as my assistant, to schedule a timer. It just googles the answer now or tells me "Gemini can't do that". 16 years ago it was doing that perfectly.
  - tonyedgecombe 9mo ago
    That's all I use Siri for. I'll be really cheesed off if this gets lost in the new version.
- eitally 9mo ago
  From several engineer answers over a few years from inside Google, the consistent answer was that they created a highly fragmented ecosystem of devices over the years, almost none of which were capable of running the same software stack/versions, which led to an enormous mountain of technical debt and spaghetti code. There was a big effort a couple years ago to resolve this by creating a single new software version that would work on all modern devices and be supportable across future generations, but it also required (hah!) they essentially abandon (not brick, but just not really actively maintain or support) a plethora of older devices. So you have lots of consumers with either a mixed device environment where there's no consistency between their devices, or consumers who only have older devices that won't run the newer software and will be complaining about performance and reliability until they eventually give up and either abandon Google Home or buy a new device.
ronnier 9mo ago
Is it not impressive what xai did with Grok? It's already integrated into twitter and my Tesla. So quickly? What prevented apple from doing the same but building out their equivalent of grok?
- nilkn 9mo ago
  This is not a bad example. Tesla is indeed running a custom LLM, available in their vehicles, capable of acting as a general chatbot and issuing commands to the car, developed in-house. While Grok is not up-to-par with other frontier models, it's certainly far beyond Siri.
- WatchDog 9mo ago
  Grok runs on a cloud server, I think Apple are trying to do as much as possible on-device, which makes it a lot harder.
- dilap 9mo ago
  Leadership matters!
  - ulfw 9mo ago
    Yea no mate. Then how would Grok function at all?
LeoPanthera 9mo ago
I'd rather they get it right than released it unfinished.
- zombot 9mo ago
  But they can't get it right. Siri seems just the most conspicuous indicator that Apple has unlearned to do software. Everything is going to shit there.
dabinat 9mo ago
I feel like the difference between Steve Jobs’ and Tim Cook’s leadership styles is that Cook is really good at optimizing existing processes, but does not have the vision to capitalize on what’s next. Apple got into the smartphone game at the right time with a lot of new ideas. But whatever the next big shift in technology is, they will be left behind. I don’t know if that is AI, but it’s clear that in AI they are already far behind other companies.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 9mo ago
  It's easy: make my life easier. Instead they choose to optimize for shareholder value.
- sampton 9mo ago
  To be fair no one has solved ai assistant at consumer level yet.
  - 0x4e 9mo ago
    I agree. It’s still being figured out. My prediction is that Apple is the hardware and platform provider (like it’s always been). We’re not asking them to come up with a better social media, or a better Notion or a better Netflix. I think their proprietary chips and GPUs are being undervalued. My feeling is that they’re letting everyone move fast and break things while trailing behind and making safe bets.
    - coolandsmartrr 9mo ago
      Funny you should mention social media in the context of Apple, because they seem to have been attempting that with iTunes Ping[1] and then Apple Music. iTunes Ping was a Jobs-era attempt to create a social network for music. It seems that they were trying to rely on integrating with Facebook, who pulled out of the collaboration in the last minute before Ping's release. Apple hasn't seem to have given up on social networks for music. Apple Music presents a nascent networking feature where users can see what their friends are listening to.[2] It seems that Apple has learned their lesson from Ping and does not rely on a third-party for a social graph, which is instead powered by iOS contacts. While social media is not Apple's bread and butter, they have maintained their interest in having presence in this market. I would assume that this stems from Apple's overall desire to maintain influence over on-the-top services that define the iOS experience. If they let third parties flourish even further, thirds parties gain leverage that they can use during negotiations with Apple. If third parties successfully negotiate for more features that creates parity with apps on non-Apple devices, Apple loses its differentiation on the device markets, thereby losing revenue. (I think Stratechery wrote about Apple's service strategy that was motivated by its past relationships with Adobe and Spotify. Couldn't find the link.) > We’re not asking them to come up with a better social media, or a better Notion or a better Netflix. You're right that we haven't asked them for better on-the-top services. But it seems to be in Apple's interest to compete with third party services providers and make sure they do not supersede Apple in terms of their influence over on-the-top experiences. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Ping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Ping [2] https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/iphone/iphdf490a9e9/ios https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/iphone/iphdf490a9e9/io...
cantalopes 9mo ago
Not sure whether it's a language/pronounciation issue but for 15 years since siri was released i have not seen a single person using it successfully without having to yell at it for not waking up or not understanding the request correctly
- pndy 9mo ago
  I was cleaning up room today and while wiping dust from bookshelf homepod sits on, siri out of blue goes with "I thought so". It'll be 15 years this October and I can't still use siri with my language.
  - myvoiceismypass 9mo ago
    I listen to Sirius XM in my car a lot and when there are ad bumpers or hosts that say "Sirius XM", it triggers siri on my watch about 10% of the time. Fun.
- MattRix 9mo ago
  I’ve been using it a dozen times a day for the past 14 years with very few issues. Certainly not enough issues that I would ever want to go back to adding things like alarms and reminders and events by hand.
- lurking_swe 9mo ago
  i guess im a unicorn haha. I routinely control my home (shades, lights, fans), set reminders for myself, set timers while cooking, and reply to (simple) text messages.
jiggawatts 9mo ago
I got myself an iPhone 16 Pro because of the promised AI features. I had a vision in my mind of what it ought be like: While driving past a restaurant, I wanted to know if they were open for lunch and if they had gluten-free items on their menu. I asked the "new" Siri to check this for me while driving, so I gave it a shot. "I did some web searches for you but I can't read it out to you while driving." Then what on earth is its purpose if not that!? THAT! That is what it's for! It's meant to be a voice assistant, not a laptop with a web browser! I checked while stopped, and it literally just googled "restaurant gluten free menu" and... that's it. Nothing specific about my location. That's nuts. Think about what data and access the phone has: 1. It knows I'm driving -- it is literally plugged into the car's Apple CarPlay port. 2. It knows where I am because it is doing the navigating. 3. It can look at the map and see the restaurant and access its metadata such as its online menu. 4. Any modern LLM can read the text of the web page and summarize it given a prompt like "does this have GF items?" 5. Text-to-voice has been a thing for a decade now. How hard can this be? Siri seems to have 10x more developer effort sunk into refusing to do the things it can already do instead of... I don't know... just doing the thing.
- microtonal 9mo ago
  Siri on the Apple Watch is even more fun. It can never answer a question and always opens up a webpage. Then you try to read it on the teensy display and then you are rewarded for your effort by the Siri/WatchOS/whatever closing the view after just a few seconds (even when you were scrolling with the crown). I am pretty sure they aren't doing any QA or the QA results don't get to the developers. With Pixel Watch I can still understand all the little bugs, it is well-known by now that (some of) the Pixel Watch PMs themselves use iPhones and Apple Watches. But you'd think that the Apple Watch PMs themselves use Apple Watches? The only other explanation that I can think of is that the org is pretty dysfunctional by now.
falaki 9mo ago
I worked at Siri (post acquisition) 13 years ago as one of the early data scientists. Let's just say I am not a bit surprised.
- tobr 9mo ago
  Say more. What did you see?
  - mathisfun123 9mo ago
    Apple is the only place I've ever worked where I really feel I'll get summarily fired for saying the wrong thing during a meeting or in my pod (if a manager overhears) - the culture is that draconian. So don't hold your breath waiting for someone to tell you things they're under NDA about (or just general litigation pressure).
flyingzucchini 9mo ago
I just wish they would fix the out of memory disaster on my MacBook that is ios26
PlunderBunny 9mo ago
Given the way current LLMs hallucinate, and given that Apple (presumably) won’t accept this behaviour in Siri, I’m skeptical that existing technology (or existing technology scaled up) can ever create the Siri Apple and its customers want.
- Jgrubb 9mo ago
  I'll settle for "gets voice to text right most of the time". Seriously, Apple is so far behind on the cheapest table stakes at this point I highly doubt their high standards is the issue.
  - FireBeyond 9mo ago
    Oh absolutely. The amount of times I have to pause, take a deep breathe and OVER-enunciate (still with mixed success) because my voice, pulse rise and my patience decreases with every absolute butchering (like not even "close but no cigar" but "how on earth did you come up with that?") Siri does to dictated text message in CarPlay...
    - rootusrootus 9mo ago
      I don’t even bother anymore. When it reads back the text message and asks if I want to send it I just laugh heartily and say yeah. Sometimes the recipient has to read it aloud and try to phonetically guess what the original words were.
  - PlunderBunny 9mo ago
    Yeah, but isn't the voice recognition (as opposed to voice comprehension) separate from the supposedly LLM powered bit of Siri? I want better voice comprehension too, but I don't think that moving to a LLM powered Siri will solve that.
    - alex43578 9mo ago
      Wouldn’t it? Something like Whisper is great for recognition, and is built on a transformer architecture, like most of the SOTA voice stuff is.
karlitooo 9mo ago
Seems weird to comment on delayed new features from Apple. Obviously if it doesn't meet the quality bar it would get pushed back, that's just how they do things. But I wonder how much of the problem is due to trying to minimise data processing off-device. Even with Open AI as a last resort, I don't imagine you get much value choosing betwixt the local model or a private cloud that doesn't save context. Meanwhile the average user is yeeting their PII into Altman's maw without much thought so Siri is always going to seem rubbish by comparison.
- brrwind 9mo ago
  But that's not just how they do things. Apple's quality bar is basically at the floor. Liquid glass, text editing on iOS...
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
isodev 9mo ago
> Siri doesn’t always properly process queries or can take too long to handle requests, they said I mean, for anyone familiar with LLMs this is not exactly a surprise. There is no way Apple can remove the inherent downsides of this technology regardless of how enthusiastic the ai bros are about it. In a twisted way, I’m happy there are at least some teams at Apple where it doesn’t get a pass for bugs just because it has AI on the sticker
dboreham 9mo ago
I think we can conclude at this point that the guy yelling at engineers to "just stick ChatGPT into Siri" doesn't understand that the result is unusable, for whatever reason. That reason might be that the UE is bad, or because it grossly violates user privacy, but it might be that Apple would loose $$$$$ because LLM inference is expensive.
DrProtic 9mo ago
This thread is an example how 24h news cycle hurts brain cells. They are late with a release, they must have unlearned to build software.
- kotaKat 9mo ago
  It’s because the writer keeps having to parrot the same garbage he guesses over and over again to prop up his paid newsletter. I am so tired of every Sunday when he unleashes his garbage out upon the masses and every Apple blog shits it back out as reliable info. One of his recent “guesses” was that iOS 26.4 beta would be out soon. Like, really?
mrweasel 9mo ago
It's hard to imagine that just killing off Siri would hurt iPhone sales. It would be interesting to know how many people actually use, or even want Siri, or any type of voice assistant for that matter. The primary value of Siri is to check a box for investors, who are riding the AI wave. The same people how rode the voice assistant wave 15 years ago. There's a lot of AI features that makes sense for Apple to include and develop, a voice assistant isn't one of them. If they want to turn Siri into an Apple ChatGPT, then that's slightly different, and more about getting yet another product that would make users sign up for a monthly iCloud subscription. If it's all on device though, that doesn't really seem like the goal.
- lxgr 9mo ago
  > It would be interesting to know how many people actually use, or even want Siri, or any type of voice assistant for that matter. Do you drive to work? I don't either, but I suspect anyone that does, and that's hundreds of millions of people in the US alone, would get a lot of value out of a version of Siri that can actually act as a "personal assistant", capable of doing things like booking a doctor's appointment that fits into their calendar, summarizing email, canceling subscriptions etc. And beyond that, I suspect the main reason voice assistants haven't taken off yet is the fact that they just haven't been possible pre-LLMs. Siri has been voice dial on a prescription-free amount of steroids. Imagine what it could do with actual contextual understanding.
  - trinix912 9mo ago
    I drive, and right now I honestly can't trust Siri to even add a to-do item properly. Sometimes it creates a calendar entry, sometimes it randomly decides to do a web search instead. They haven't really been doing anything to fix this (until now, that is).
- pwagland 9mo ago
  You would be surprised I think. I know a bunch of people who use Siri, for all sorts of things. I personally regularly use the "push to activate" Siri for quickly setting up meetings et al. And a *lot* of people want to use Siri while driving, when they can't access the phone, at least not legally.
ed_mercer 9mo ago
> Siri doesn’t always properly process queries or can take too long to handle requests, they said. Is this really a reason to delay though? It's not like the current Siri is capable of processing queries outside of "set a timer"
submeta 9mo ago
Everyone keeps arguing that AI is not Apple’s core business and that their priorities are different. From an end-user perspective, that is irrelevant. What users actually experience is this: every other major platform is shipping increasingly capable intelligent assistants. These systems can interpret intent, execute multi-step actions, and meaningfully reduce friction. Meanwhile, Siri still struggles with fairly basic workflows. At the end of the day, I do not particularly care about internal constraints, organizational structure, privacy positioning, or strategic rationale. What matters is whether the product works. Today, I still cannot reliably: - Dictate complex voice input without constant correction - Use voice to control my iPhone in a composable way such as “open this contact and send a message,” “replay the song I liked yesterday,” or “create a note in Obsidian with this content: …” - Chain actions together in a way that reflects actual user intent These are not futuristic requests. They are practical, everyday workflows that competitors are increasingly able to handle. The gap is no longer about incremental feature parity. It is about whether Apple can deliver a genuinely intelligent interface layer, or whether Siri remains a deterministic command parser in an era where users expect contextual reasoning.

136 points by petethomas 9mo ago

Damn paywalls! Sorry, I shouldn't be so negative. I'd just like to be able to read the article.

https://archive.is/2026.02.11-194917/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-11/apple-s-ios-26-4-siri-update-runs-into-snags-in-internal-testing-ios-26-5-27 https://archive.is/2026.02.11-194917/https://www.bloomberg.c...

louiereederson 9mo ago

[flagged]

tiffanyh 9mo ago

Do similar issues exist with Gemini on Android? Or are these challenges very Siri/iOS specific?

shakna 9mo ago
Gemini can and does send everything to Google. Apple's challenge is they want to maintain privacy, which means doing everything on-device. Which is currently slower than the servers that others can bring to the table - because they already grab every piece of data you have.
- AnonHP 9mo ago
  > Apple's challenge is they want to maintain privacy, which means doing everything on-device. Apple is not trying to do everything on-device, though it prefers this as much as possible. This is why it built Private Cloud Compute (PCC) and as I understand it, it’s within a PCC environment that Google’s Gemini (for Apple’s users) will be hosted as well.
- ComputerGuru 9mo ago
  This isn't planned to be exclusively on-device. Siri isn't exclusively on-device now, to begin with.
- pjmlp 9mo ago
  No they aren't, that is why Private Cloud Compute is a thing.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

jdlyga 9mo ago

This is obviously a death march project. Just delay it indefinitely until the Google Gemini based Siri chatbot is ready. Why ship something half-assed?

lysace 9mo ago
The referenced Bloomberg source (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-11/apple-s-ios-26-4-siri-update-runs-into-snags-in-internal-testing-ios-26-5-27 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-11/apple-s-i...) says this about the delayed effort: But it’s been a complex undertaking. The revamped Siri is built on an entirely new architecture dubbed Linwood. Its software will rely on the company’s large language model platform — known as Apple Foundations Models — which is now incorporating technology from Alphabet Inc.’s Google Gemini team.

fartfeatures 9mo ago

This was such a self inflicted own goal. Siri has needed work for years and every year they neglected it. When they first bought Siri it was state of the art and then it just languished. Pulling an Intel and sweating your assets until it is too late is never a good idea.

azinman2 9mo ago
Siri has had many, many, many engineers on it for a while.
- wronglebowski 9mo ago
  I don't doubt it, but what were they all doing? The Metaverse had 10k employees on it for multiple years and seemed to almost be a standstill for long periods of time. What do these massive teams do all day?
  - owlbite 9mo ago
    Have meetings to figure out how to interact with the other 9990 employees. Then try and make the skeleton app left behind by the team of transient engineers who left after 18 months before moving on to their next gig work, before throwing it out and starting again from scratch.
    - sockaddr 9mo ago
      Exactly. What Meta accomplished could have been done by a team of less than 40 mediocre engineers. It’s really just not even worth analyzing the failure. I am in complete awe when I think about how bad the execution of this whole thing was. It doesn’t even feel real.
      - doctor_blood 9mo ago
        Actually I would like see a post-mortem that showed where all the money actually went; they somehow spent ~85x of what RSI has raised for Star Citizen, and what they had to show for it was worse than some student projects I've seen. Were they just piling up cash in the parking lot to set it on fire?

luxuryballs 9mo ago

Are Apple AI agent delays bearish for AI agents in general? Unless something else is the issue it’s normal behavior for Apple not to implement something everyone else already has until it’s very good and solid.

barbacoa 9mo ago
Apple wants to vertically integrate. Their AI strategy until recently was to develop their own LLM models that were small enough to run on device. But massive scaling is what makes LLMs so powerful, so all their internal models were terrible and unusable. Basically they bet that compute efficient LLMs were the future. That bet was wrong and the opposite came true.
sigmar 9mo ago
These aren't "agent" features. they're the features announced in 2024, like ai summaries in web search and natural language image editing
- luxuryballs 9mo ago
  I think to a similar point, if Apple is so picky about it that it’s still not ready… it definitely tracks with my experience using ai, it requires my review and often bungles things, I wouldn’t just turn it over to my customer yet and trust it to be reliably high quality.

lacker 9mo ago

It doesn't surprise me that Siri continues to be bad - Apple's current plan is to use a low-quality LLM to build a top-quality product, which turned out to be impossible. What does surprise me is that Google Home is still so bad. They rolled out the new Gemini-based version, but if anything it's even worse than the old one. Same capabilities but more long-winded talking about them. It is still unable to answer basic questions like "what timer did you just cancel".

paul7986 9mo ago
Indeed especially compared to chatGPT running so much better on my same iPhone where siri shits the bed. Voice transcription sucks in every aspects on my iPhone except surprise chatGPT gets what I am saying 90% of the time.
zmmmmm 9mo ago
I can't even get gemini on my phone, configured as my assistant, to schedule a timer. It just googles the answer now or tells me "Gemini can't do that". 16 years ago it was doing that perfectly.
- tonyedgecombe 9mo ago
  That's all I use Siri for. I'll be really cheesed off if this gets lost in the new version.
eitally 9mo ago
From several engineer answers over a few years from inside Google, the consistent answer was that they created a highly fragmented ecosystem of devices over the years, almost none of which were capable of running the same software stack/versions, which led to an enormous mountain of technical debt and spaghetti code. There was a big effort a couple years ago to resolve this by creating a single new software version that would work on all modern devices and be supportable across future generations, but it also required (hah!) they essentially abandon (not brick, but just not really actively maintain or support) a plethora of older devices. So you have lots of consumers with either a mixed device environment where there's no consistency between their devices, or consumers who only have older devices that won't run the newer software and will be complaining about performance and reliability until they eventually give up and either abandon Google Home or buy a new device.

ronnier 9mo ago

Is it not impressive what xai did with Grok? It's already integrated into twitter and my Tesla. So quickly? What prevented apple from doing the same but building out their equivalent of grok?

nilkn 9mo ago
This is not a bad example. Tesla is indeed running a custom LLM, available in their vehicles, capable of acting as a general chatbot and issuing commands to the car, developed in-house. While Grok is not up-to-par with other frontier models, it's certainly far beyond Siri.
WatchDog 9mo ago
Grok runs on a cloud server, I think Apple are trying to do as much as possible on-device, which makes it a lot harder.
dilap 9mo ago
Leadership matters!
- ulfw 9mo ago
  Yea no mate. Then how would Grok function at all?

LeoPanthera 9mo ago

I'd rather they get it right than released it unfinished.

zombot 9mo ago
But they can't get it right. Siri seems just the most conspicuous indicator that Apple has unlearned to do software. Everything is going to shit there.

dabinat 9mo ago

I feel like the difference between Steve Jobs’ and Tim Cook’s leadership styles is that Cook is really good at optimizing existing processes, but does not have the vision to capitalize on what’s next. Apple got into the smartphone game at the right time with a lot of new ideas. But whatever the next big shift in technology is, they will be left behind. I don’t know if that is AI, but it’s clear that in AI they are already far behind other companies.

2OEH8eoCRo0 9mo ago
It's easy: make my life easier. Instead they choose to optimize for shareholder value.
sampton 9mo ago
To be fair no one has solved ai assistant at consumer level yet.
- 0x4e 9mo ago
  I agree. It’s still being figured out. My prediction is that Apple is the hardware and platform provider (like it’s always been). We’re not asking them to come up with a better social media, or a better Notion or a better Netflix. I think their proprietary chips and GPUs are being undervalued. My feeling is that they’re letting everyone move fast and break things while trailing behind and making safe bets.
  - coolandsmartrr 9mo ago
    Funny you should mention social media in the context of Apple, because they seem to have been attempting that with iTunes Ping[1] and then Apple Music. iTunes Ping was a Jobs-era attempt to create a social network for music. It seems that they were trying to rely on integrating with Facebook, who pulled out of the collaboration in the last minute before Ping's release. Apple hasn't seem to have given up on social networks for music. Apple Music presents a nascent networking feature where users can see what their friends are listening to.[2] It seems that Apple has learned their lesson from Ping and does not rely on a third-party for a social graph, which is instead powered by iOS contacts. While social media is not Apple's bread and butter, they have maintained their interest in having presence in this market. I would assume that this stems from Apple's overall desire to maintain influence over on-the-top services that define the iOS experience. If they let third parties flourish even further, thirds parties gain leverage that they can use during negotiations with Apple. If third parties successfully negotiate for more features that creates parity with apps on non-Apple devices, Apple loses its differentiation on the device markets, thereby losing revenue. (I think Stratechery wrote about Apple's service strategy that was motivated by its past relationships with Adobe and Spotify. Couldn't find the link.) > We’re not asking them to come up with a better social media, or a better Notion or a better Netflix. You're right that we haven't asked them for better on-the-top services. But it seems to be in Apple's interest to compete with third party services providers and make sure they do not supersede Apple in terms of their influence over on-the-top experiences. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Ping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Ping [2] https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/iphone/iphdf490a9e9/ios https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/iphone/iphdf490a9e9/io...

cantalopes 9mo ago

Not sure whether it's a language/pronounciation issue but for 15 years since siri was released i have not seen a single person using it successfully without having to yell at it for not waking up or not understanding the request correctly

pndy 9mo ago
I was cleaning up room today and while wiping dust from bookshelf homepod sits on, siri out of blue goes with "I thought so". It'll be 15 years this October and I can't still use siri with my language.
- myvoiceismypass 9mo ago
  I listen to Sirius XM in my car a lot and when there are ad bumpers or hosts that say "Sirius XM", it triggers siri on my watch about 10% of the time. Fun.
MattRix 9mo ago
I’ve been using it a dozen times a day for the past 14 years with very few issues. Certainly not enough issues that I would ever want to go back to adding things like alarms and reminders and events by hand.
lurking_swe 9mo ago
i guess im a unicorn haha. I routinely control my home (shades, lights, fans), set reminders for myself, set timers while cooking, and reply to (simple) text messages.

jiggawatts 9mo ago

I got myself an iPhone 16 Pro because of the promised AI features. I had a vision in my mind of what it ought be like: While driving past a restaurant, I wanted to know if they were open for lunch and if they had gluten-free items on their menu. I asked the "new" Siri to check this for me while driving, so I gave it a shot. "I did some web searches for you but I can't read it out to you while driving." Then what on earth is its purpose if not that!? THAT! That is what it's for! It's meant to be a voice assistant, not a laptop with a web browser! I checked while stopped, and it literally just googled "restaurant gluten free menu" and... that's it. Nothing specific about my location. That's nuts. Think about what data and access the phone has: 1. It knows I'm driving -- it is literally plugged into the car's Apple CarPlay port. 2. It knows where I am because it is doing the navigating. 3. It can look at the map and see the restaurant and access its metadata such as its online menu. 4. Any modern LLM can read the text of the web page and summarize it given a prompt like "does this have GF items?" 5. Text-to-voice has been a thing for a decade now. How hard can this be? Siri seems to have 10x more developer effort sunk into refusing to do the things it can already do instead of... I don't know... just doing the thing.

microtonal 9mo ago
Siri on the Apple Watch is even more fun. It can never answer a question and always opens up a webpage. Then you try to read it on the teensy display and then you are rewarded for your effort by the Siri/WatchOS/whatever closing the view after just a few seconds (even when you were scrolling with the crown). I am pretty sure they aren't doing any QA or the QA results don't get to the developers. With Pixel Watch I can still understand all the little bugs, it is well-known by now that (some of) the Pixel Watch PMs themselves use iPhones and Apple Watches. But you'd think that the Apple Watch PMs themselves use Apple Watches? The only other explanation that I can think of is that the org is pretty dysfunctional by now.

falaki 9mo ago

I worked at Siri (post acquisition) 13 years ago as one of the early data scientists. Let's just say I am not a bit surprised.

tobr 9mo ago
Say more. What did you see?
- mathisfun123 9mo ago
  Apple is the only place I've ever worked where I really feel I'll get summarily fired for saying the wrong thing during a meeting or in my pod (if a manager overhears) - the culture is that draconian. So don't hold your breath waiting for someone to tell you things they're under NDA about (or just general litigation pressure).

flyingzucchini 9mo ago

I just wish they would fix the out of memory disaster on my MacBook that is ios26

PlunderBunny 9mo ago

Given the way current LLMs hallucinate, and given that Apple (presumably) won’t accept this behaviour in Siri, I’m skeptical that existing technology (or existing technology scaled up) can ever create the Siri Apple and its customers want.

Jgrubb 9mo ago
I'll settle for "gets voice to text right most of the time". Seriously, Apple is so far behind on the cheapest table stakes at this point I highly doubt their high standards is the issue.
- FireBeyond 9mo ago
  Oh absolutely. The amount of times I have to pause, take a deep breathe and OVER-enunciate (still with mixed success) because my voice, pulse rise and my patience decreases with every absolute butchering (like not even "close but no cigar" but "how on earth did you come up with that?") Siri does to dictated text message in CarPlay...
  - rootusrootus 9mo ago
    I don’t even bother anymore. When it reads back the text message and asks if I want to send it I just laugh heartily and say yeah. Sometimes the recipient has to read it aloud and try to phonetically guess what the original words were.
- PlunderBunny 9mo ago
  Yeah, but isn't the voice recognition (as opposed to voice comprehension) separate from the supposedly LLM powered bit of Siri? I want better voice comprehension too, but I don't think that moving to a LLM powered Siri will solve that.
  - alex43578 9mo ago
    Wouldn’t it? Something like Whisper is great for recognition, and is built on a transformer architecture, like most of the SOTA voice stuff is.

karlitooo 9mo ago

Seems weird to comment on delayed new features from Apple. Obviously if it doesn't meet the quality bar it would get pushed back, that's just how they do things. But I wonder how much of the problem is due to trying to minimise data processing off-device. Even with Open AI as a last resort, I don't imagine you get much value choosing betwixt the local model or a private cloud that doesn't save context. Meanwhile the average user is yeeting their PII into Altman's maw without much thought so Siri is always going to seem rubbish by comparison.

brrwind 9mo ago
But that's not just how they do things. Apple's quality bar is basically at the floor. Liquid glass, text editing on iOS...

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

isodev 9mo ago

> Siri doesn’t always properly process queries or can take too long to handle requests, they said I mean, for anyone familiar with LLMs this is not exactly a surprise. There is no way Apple can remove the inherent downsides of this technology regardless of how enthusiastic the ai bros are about it. In a twisted way, I’m happy there are at least some teams at Apple where it doesn’t get a pass for bugs just because it has AI on the sticker

dboreham 9mo ago

I think we can conclude at this point that the guy yelling at engineers to "just stick ChatGPT into Siri" doesn't understand that the result is unusable, for whatever reason. That reason might be that the UE is bad, or because it grossly violates user privacy, but it might be that Apple would loose $$$$$ because LLM inference is expensive.

DrProtic 9mo ago

This thread is an example how 24h news cycle hurts brain cells. They are late with a release, they must have unlearned to build software.

kotaKat 9mo ago
It’s because the writer keeps having to parrot the same garbage he guesses over and over again to prop up his paid newsletter. I am so tired of every Sunday when he unleashes his garbage out upon the masses and every Apple blog shits it back out as reliable info. One of his recent “guesses” was that iOS 26.4 beta would be out soon. Like, really?

mrweasel 9mo ago

It's hard to imagine that just killing off Siri would hurt iPhone sales. It would be interesting to know how many people actually use, or even want Siri, or any type of voice assistant for that matter. The primary value of Siri is to check a box for investors, who are riding the AI wave. The same people how rode the voice assistant wave 15 years ago. There's a lot of AI features that makes sense for Apple to include and develop, a voice assistant isn't one of them. If they want to turn Siri into an Apple ChatGPT, then that's slightly different, and more about getting yet another product that would make users sign up for a monthly iCloud subscription. If it's all on device though, that doesn't really seem like the goal.

lxgr 9mo ago
> It would be interesting to know how many people actually use, or even want Siri, or any type of voice assistant for that matter. Do you drive to work? I don't either, but I suspect anyone that does, and that's hundreds of millions of people in the US alone, would get a lot of value out of a version of Siri that can actually act as a "personal assistant", capable of doing things like booking a doctor's appointment that fits into their calendar, summarizing email, canceling subscriptions etc. And beyond that, I suspect the main reason voice assistants haven't taken off yet is the fact that they just haven't been possible pre-LLMs. Siri has been voice dial on a prescription-free amount of steroids. Imagine what it could do with actual contextual understanding.
- trinix912 9mo ago
  I drive, and right now I honestly can't trust Siri to even add a to-do item properly. Sometimes it creates a calendar entry, sometimes it randomly decides to do a web search instead. They haven't really been doing anything to fix this (until now, that is).
pwagland 9mo ago
You would be surprised I think. I know a bunch of people who use Siri, for all sorts of things. I personally regularly use the "push to activate" Siri for quickly setting up meetings et al. And a *lot* of people want to use Siri while driving, when they can't access the phone, at least not legally.

ed_mercer 9mo ago

> Siri doesn’t always properly process queries or can take too long to handle requests, they said. Is this really a reason to delay though? It's not like the current Siri is capable of processing queries outside of "set a timer"

submeta 9mo ago

Everyone keeps arguing that AI is not Apple’s core business and that their priorities are different. From an end-user perspective, that is irrelevant. What users actually experience is this: every other major platform is shipping increasingly capable intelligent assistants. These systems can interpret intent, execute multi-step actions, and meaningfully reduce friction. Meanwhile, Siri still struggles with fairly basic workflows. At the end of the day, I do not particularly care about internal constraints, organizational structure, privacy positioning, or strategic rationale. What matters is whether the product works. Today, I still cannot reliably: - Dictate complex voice input without constant correction - Use voice to control my iPhone in a composable way such as “open this contact and send a message,” “replay the song I liked yesterday,” or “create a note in Obsidian with this content: …” - Chain actions together in a way that reflects actual user intent These are not futuristic requests. They are practical, everyday workflows that competitors are increasingly able to handle. The gap is no longer about incremental feature parity. It is about whether Apple can deliver a genuinely intelligent interface layer, or whether Siri remains a deterministic command parser in an era where users expect contextual reasoning.