According to a paywalled report from The Information and interviews with over three dozen former Apple employees, Siri and Apple’s AI efforts have been hindered by caution and organizational dysfunction. The former employees state that the lack of ambition and organizational dysfunction have held back Siri and the company’s AI technologies, with Siri being “widely derided” inside the company for its lack of functionality and minimal improvement over time. The team that worked on Siri apparently “devolved into a mess” by 2018, driven by petty turf battles between senior leaders and heated arguments over the direction of the assistant. Additionally, Siri’s leadership did not want to invest in building tools to analyze Siri’s usage, and engineers lacked the ability to obtain basic details such as how many people were using the virtual assistant and how often they were doing so. Several former employees called the data science and engineering team’s data on Siri “a waste of time and money.”
The report suggests that many Apple employees left the company because it was too slow to make decisions or too conservative in its approach to new AI technologies. Apple executives are said to have dismissed proposals to give Siri the ability to conduct extended conversations as gimmicky and challenging to control. Apple’s uncompromising stance on privacy has also created challenges for enhancing Siri. Cook and other senior executives requested changes to Siri to prevent embarrassing responses and preferred Siri’s responses to be pre-written by a team of around 20 writers instead of AI-generated.
In 2019, the Siri team explored a project to rewrite the virtual assistant from scratch, codenamed “Blackbird.” The effort sought to create a lightweight version of Siri that would delegate the creation of functions to app developers and would run on iPhones instead of the cloud to improve performance and privacy. Demos of Blackbird apparently prompted excitement among Apple employees owing to its utility and responsiveness.
However, the project was killed by two senior leaders on the Siri team who were responsible for helping Siri understand and respond to queries. These individuals pushed for their own project, codenamed “Siri X,” for the 10th anniversary of the virtual assistant. The project aimed to move Siri’s processing on-device for privacy reasons, without the lightweight, modular functionality of Blackbird. Hundreds of employees working on Blackbird were assigned to Siri X.
Most recently, the group working on Apple’s mixed reality headset were reportedly disappointed by the demonstrations provided by the Siri team on how the virtual assistant could control the headset. At one point in the device’s development, the headset team considered building an alternative method for controlling the device using voice commands because Siri was deemed to be unsatisfactory.
