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Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

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Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gemini has access to your Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Drive, Keep, and Tasks, as well as Flights, Hotels, Maps, YouTube, YouTube Music, OpenStax, and of course the entire web more generally. > Nothing else has access to relevant data. Simply not true.

[flagged]

At the end of the day, personal context is king for useful AI.

Which means Google or Apple. Or Microsoft on the business side.

Nobody sane is going to share all their personal data (about everything) with a fly-by-night random AI app/company.

Apple has time, in the same way it did with Maps, because despite the marketing push no one is buying phones solely because of AI features these days. They're still an "Oh, that's nice."

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#102
post #60
post #47

Siri can’t even answer what month it is so the only way is up from here I guess https://old.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1jehkpm/apple_intel...

I had to try to believe and I'm baffled.

Having used it over the years I'm not. It feels like Siri uses AI/ML for speech recognition and then some pattern matching for the actual actions.

Meanwhile LLM's came along and shifted peoples expectations.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#103
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In fact I'm afraid they'll break it by shoving down Gemini. i have a pixel 9 with gemini. i absolutely hate it. google assistant is miles ahead. and btw, i'm not the only one complaining https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/1jdpvnq/gemini...

oh nooo! for now they still allow me to stay with the good old Google Assistant. But it's only a matter of time until some exec removes it to "improve Gemini adoption".

yeah, android authority has said that 2025 is the last year of old google assistant. i dread having to use gemini every single day.

https://www.androidauthority.com/google-killing-assistant-35...

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like Apple had a dream of a granting easy AI integrations for many different apps and workflows, only to discover that very few people wanted any of those integrations from apple intelligence. At least, not the current iteration of apple intelligence.

Well, the current iteration of Apple intelligence doesn’t enable personal context or 3rd party app related features at all . ( https://www.macrumors.com/2025/03/07/apple-intelligence-siri... ) So who knows whether people people want it or not; it’s not even out in the world! What Apple has actually discovered is that this is a hard problem to solve. But people do want a smarter Siri; they complain about it constantly…

Making functional AI ('It does all things') work well across a platform is an integration problem.

Which are historically the hardest problems for engineering orgs to ship: precisely because they cut across team/org boundaries.

Suddenly the Maps team need to give a shit about the Calendar team, etc.

And both teams tend to exaggerate and say 'Sure, our side of the integration is finished... it must be a problem on their side.'

Ironically, Amazon-as-a-company probably has the most experience retooling this way -- from the Bezos API memo. Because that's what it will take.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#106
post #55

IMO, Craig Federighi is quite good at presentations and his own style of humor, but he doesn’t seem to have a good grip on the quality of software across all of Apple’s (buggy) platforms and apps. I don’t believe that moving Siri under him (i.e., his reporting structure) is a good idea. Only time will tell. There are far more bugs and issues that are to be fixed (but don’t get attention) than Siri. Anyway Siri has be…

The issue is without Scott Forstall its rubbish, process over substance & Tim Cook empowered that change to keep everyone happy.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#107

Would whoever in Apple who originally setup that AI division take the appropriate "blame" for being wrong and resign themselves? Hardly.

It's not uncommon for technology companies to over promise and under deliver. We just aren't used to it from Apple because of their secretive nature. They released a new MacBook recently and we don't know whether that was on time or months late simply because Apple never mentioned it before the product was released.

Whether the fault lies with individuals or the structure of the organisation is a more interesting question. I wonder if American corporations would take a more individualistic approach to this compared to their European and Asian peers.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#108
post #55

IMO, Craig Federighi is quite good at presentations and his own style of humor, but he doesn’t seem to have a good grip on the quality of software across all of Apple’s (buggy) platforms and apps. I don’t believe that moving Siri under him (i.e., his reporting structure) is a good idea. Only time will tell. There are far more bugs and issues that are to be fixed (but don’t get attention) than Siri. Anyway Siri has be…

Literally the only time I ever use Siri is to set a timer. That is, if I’m lucky and she actually understands me. It’s such an embarrassment in 2025.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#109
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might be completely wrong, but by making “pro-privacy bets”, they shot themselves in the foot. Average customer ended up really not caring about the benefits that we try to promote, which hinders the development and features in some sense. Also, it’s still a pain for them to integrate AI in their second biggest market — China.

I care about privacy but Siri is so immensely frustrating and terrible that at this point I'd rather just prefer a competent integration with an AI that actually works.

I care about privacy too, that’s one of the reasons why I’m within Apple garden. But it definitely adds some hurdles when you want to do stuff like “literally take all of my data from every possible place and do stuff with it”.

Re: Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri

#110
Does Google have an LLM based AI experience for Android? What are they doing differently to avoid the problems plaguing Apple. The core technology in both can't be that different. Or is it an expectation thing?

I feel like they may be experiencing that issue where the product is quite good within some core set of features, but the edge cases are where all the paper cuts happen. And when its a singular product on a singular device made by a singular company, those paper cuts really add up. There must be a more succinct term for that.

Can it even be solved with the current state of LLMs?

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