NYT: AI-powered Siri is on track for launch alongside iOS 19 in the fall

An AI-infused version of the Siri digital assistant, promised as part of the Apple Intelligence features previewed in July 2024, should be ready to launch this fall.

Apple has fumbled Siri’s AI makeover so badly that it had no choice but delay the promised features, publicly admitting an AI version of the assistant would arrive “in the coming year.” The vague statement left us speculating whether the company was aiming to release an AI-infused Siri publicly this fall fall alongside iOS 19 or later in 2025 via updates to iOS 19 or as part of iOS 20 in the fall of 2026.

The New York Times now says the revamped Siri is coming this fall. It doesn’t specify whether the assistant would be included in the initial iOS 19.0 release in September or a point update like iOS 19.1 later in the fall.

“Apple hasn’t canceled its revamped Siri. The company plans to release a virtual assistant in the fall capable of doing things like editing and sending a photo to a friend on request, three people with knowledge of its plans said,” reads the piece.

NYT: AI-powered Siri coming this fall

Tripp Mickle at The New York Times:

The company’s issues underscored how its reputation for innovation, once considered a fundamental element of its brand, has become an albatross, fueling angst among employees and frustration among customers.

The albatross comparisons sounds apt.

And company insiders worry that Apple, despite its years of gravity-defying profits, is hamstrung by the political infighting, penny pinching and talent drain that often bedevil large companies, according to more than a dozen former and current employees and advisers.

Penny pinching came into light in early 2023, when Apple’s AI chief John Giannandrea wanted to buy more Nvidia chips for AI training. At the time, Apple’s data centers had about 50,000 GPUs that were more than five years old. In comparison, Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Meta had purchased hundreds of thousands of GPUs. Cook approved doubling the AI team’s chip budget, but finance chief Luca Maestri got in the way, reducing the increase to less than half that. HE reportedly “encouraged the team” to make the chips they had “more efficient.” If that’s not penny pinching, I don’t know what is.

The lack of GPUs meant the team developing AI systems had to negotiate for data center computing power from its providers like Google and Amazon, two of the people said. The leading chips made by Nvidia were in such demand that Apple used alternative chips made by Google for some of its AI development.

On political infighting:

At the same time, leaders at two of Apple’s software teams were battling over who would spearhead the rollout of Siri’s new abilities, three people who worked on the effort said. Robby Walker, who oversaw Siri, and Sebastien Marineau-Mes, a senior executive with the software team, struggled over who would have responsibility for some aspects of the project. Both ended up with pieces of the project.

On talent drain:

In 2019, Jony Ive, the company’s chief designer, left to start his own design firm and poached more than a dozen integral Apple designers and engineers. And Dan Riccio, the company’s longtime head of product design who sworked on the Apple Watch, retired last year.

So far, the Siri makeover has included a glow animation around the edges when invoking the assistant, the ability to tap into Apple’s support articles to provide product knowledge and an integration with ChatGPT. The delayed features include awareness of the user’s personal content (“When’s Mom’s flight arriving?”) and taking complex actions across apps on your behalf.

Apple’s Siri problems are a sign of poor leadership

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that Apple’s leadership revealed in an all-hands meeting following the announcement of the Siri delay that internal testing had found that an AI-infused Siri was inaccurate on nearly a third of requests.

Apple has suffered a significant blow to its reputation over the Siri delay, resulting in a reshuffling among its executive ranks. The Siri team is now under the leadership of Apple’s software chief Craig Federighi, with Mike Rockwell, the head of its Vision Pro headset, charged with leading the project instead of John Giannandrea.

The Information recently reported that much of Apple’s problems with Siri stem from poor leadership. Unnamed employees told the publication that Robby Walker, the former executive in charge of AI upgrades to Siri, lacks “both ambition and an appetite for taking risks” on designing future versions of the voice assistant.

Among engineers inside Apple, the AI group’s relaxed culture and struggles with execution have even earned it an uncharitable nickname, a play on its initials: AIMLess.

Ouch! The article also claims that the Siri demo where the assistant is asked about an executive mom’s flight landing and lunch plans was choreographed, and that the only feature ready for testing was the new Siri glow animation:

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.

Software chief Craig Federighi has reportedly built his own AI division, dubbed Intelligent Systems, as part of the reshuffling. Meanwhile, John Giannandrea is now apparently solely focused on Apple’s research in the AI and ML fields. Most importantly, Federighi is said to have changed Apple’s policy to permit the use of third-party AI models to build new Siri features.

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