Apple is boosting Siri team moral following embarrassing delays; won’t ship new Siri features until they’re ready for prime time
Following the recent delays, Apple has praised the hard work of the employees who have been working on infusing the assistant with AI features.
Apple has dropped the ball by delaying significant AI-powered enhancements for Siri that it previewed at the WWDC24 and actively promoted on its website and in iPhone commercials, including the pulled ad that showcased a more personal Siri.
The company has had to admit that a more personal version of Siri isn’t coming anytime soon. The Apple Intelligence mishap has generated bad press and tarnished Apple’s reputation, especially after Apple pundit John Gruber delivered a scathing take on Apple’s broken AI promises and the delayed Siri update in a piece titled “Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino.”
No one is getting fired over the Siri debacle
Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg, writes that Robby Walker, Apple’s senior director overseeing the Siri team, called delays “ugly and embarrassing” in an all-hands Siri team meeting, adding that publicly promoting an AI-infused Siri before it was ready was a bad marketing call.
He made two key points. First, he said that it’s not yet clear when the Siri enhancements will actually launch. Second, Apple won’t fire its AI chief John Giannandrea or any other Siri executives at this time. In fact, the company has already appointed a 36-year veteran software executive to fix the troubled Siri assistant and advance its various artificial intelligence efforts to catch up to rivals.
Walker also praised the “incredibly impressive” features the team has developed so far and confirmed that Apple has not changed its decision to “ship the world’s greatest virtual assistant.” In an earlier statement, Apple didn’t give a reason for the Siri delay or provide a more precise timeline for when the delayed features might arrive aside from a vague “in the coming year” phrase.
Apple won’t ship AI Siri until it’s ready
“We’ve been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps,” reads Apple’s public statement. “It’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year.”
It’s unclear if that means the delayed features will arrive alongside iOS 19 later this year or via iOS 20 in September 2026. “We have other commitments across Apple to other projects,” he said, mentioning new software and hardware initiatives.
“We want to keep our commitments to those, and we understand those are now potentially more timeline-urgent than the features that have been deferred.” Walker added that fans “are not expecting only these new features but they also want a more fully rounded-out Siri,” adding that Apple is “going to ship these features and more as soon as they are ready.”
Apple is reassuring employees after the recent Siri delays
Walker said employees might be “feeling angry, disappointed, burned out and embarrassed.” He told the Siri team members they should be proud because they poured their “hearts and souls into this thing.”
This is the right move to make here. Apple would hurt itself even more by firing key Siri team members over the delays because Apple is already behind in the AI race and cannot afford to lose more time by making critical changes to its leadership team or the Siri team while it’s still developing the promised features.
“I saw so many people giving everything they had in order to make this happen and to make incredible progress together,” he allegedly said during the team meeting. He ensured employees that Apple would not release the promised Siri feature until they were ready for prime time. “These are not quite ready to go to the general public, even though our competitors might have launched them in this state or worse.”
Walker said that an AI-infused Siri doesn’t work correctly every one out of three times, adding that more progress will be needed to get those numbers up before Apple users “get something they can really count on.”
A demo of Siri’s AI capabilities
Walker demonstrated the current Siri capabilities so that everyone was on the same page about the team’s progress. He showed off locating his driver’s license number, finding specific photos of a child, and performing complex tasks across apps by embedding content in an email, adding recipients, and making other changes.
He singled out the personal search feature, which doesn’t always work sufficiently, as an example of the team’s hard work, saying they should “feel really proud of innovative work.” Personal search enables Siri to gather data from apps you use for queries like “When’s my mom’s flight landing?” Responding to such deeply personal requests requires access to your most personal information in emails and messages.
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