Apple's AI Ambitions Falter: Siri Upgrade Delayed Indefinitely

To Truly Fix Siri, Apple May Have to Backtrack on One Key Thing -- Privacy

Announced in June 2024 at Apple's World Wide Developer Conference, the artificial intelligence system arrived on the whole iPhone 16 family in October (and iPhone 15 Pro handsets, too), bringing things like generative tools for folks who can't be bothered to write emails, and summaries for those who can't be bothered to read, well, just about anything. December's addition, Genmoji -- an AI emoji generator -- didn't exactly bring much by way of excitement either. At the heart of the Apple Intelligence we were actually promised is a new Siri, an upgraded version of Apple's voice assistant, enhanced with some of the same smarts that made ChatGPT so beguiling at its launch in 2022. Amazon made similar moves recently with its upgrade to Alexa+, but a more intelligent Siri is still MIA. It was meant to be here already. After initially postponing the full rollout from April to May this year, Apple has now had to delay its launch indefinitely. According to a recent report from Bloomberg, Siri simply doesn't work properly, and by the time Apple's marketing department started pitching Apple Intelligence's upgrades to the iPhone-buying public last year, it was little more than a "barely working prototype." An iPhone 16 feature is becoming an iPhone 17 one, if we're lucky. It might seem unfathomable that a multitrillion dollar company could allow its promises to so far outstrip its deliverables. But when you look back, this story echoes throughout the life of Siri so far. In October 2011 Apple first introduced us to Siri as a core feature of the iPhone 4S. This was years before the first Amazon Echo in 2014, and was only the day before the death of Steve Jobs, who had resigned as CEO less than two months prior. This Siri announcement was accompanied by a promo video of the assistant in use, depicting what seemed like a slice of tech magic.

Did AI mania rush Apple into making a rare misstep with Siri? | John Naughton

The company that prides itself on announcing products only when they're ready grossly underestimated the demands of personalising its virtual assistant After ChatGPT broke cover in late 2022 and the tech industry embarked on its contemporary rendering of tulip mania, people started to wonder why the biggest tech giant of all - Apple - was keeping its distance from the madness. Eventually, the tech commentariat decided that there could be only two possible interpretations of this corporate standoffishness: either Apple was way behind the game being played by OpenAI et al; or it had cunning plans to unleash upon the world its own world-beating take on the technology. Finally, at its annual World Wide Developers' Conference (WWDC) on 10 June last year Apple came clean. Or appeared to. For Apple, "AI" would not mean what those vulgar louts at OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Meta raved about, but something altogether more refined and sophisticated - something called "Apple Intelligence". It was not, as the veteran Apple-watcher John Gruber put it, a single thing or product but "a marketing term for a collection of features, apps, and services". Putting it all under a single, memorable label made it easier for users to understand that Apple was launching something really novel. And, of course, it also made it easier for Apple to say that users who wanted to have all of these fancy features would have to buy an iPhone 15 Pro, because older devices wouldn't be up to the task. Needless to say, this columnist fell for it and upgraded. (Verily, one sucker is born every minute.) As a piece of kit, the new phone was impressive: the powerful new processor chips, neural engine etc worked a treat. And the camera turned out to be astonishingly good. But the Apple Intelligence features enabled by the upgrade seemed trivial and sometimes irritating. It immediately started messing with my photo collection, for example, imposing categories on images that were intrusive, unwanted and annoying. And there was a new pre-installed app called Image Playground that apparently "makes communication and self-expression even more fun" - which might possibly be true if one were a four-year-old with a short attention span, but is otherwise a turkey from central casting and should have been strangled at birth. There was one feature, though, that looked interesting and possibly useful - a serious enhancement of Siri, Apple's attempt at a virtual personal assistant. Henceforth, the company announced: "Siri will be able to deliver intelligence that's tailored to the user and their on-device information. For example, a user can say, 'Play that podcast that Jamie recommended,' and Siri will locate and play the episode, without the user having to remember whether it was mentioned in a text or an email. Or they could ask, 'When is Mom's flight landing?' and Siri will find the flight details and cross-reference them with real-time flight tracking to give an arrival time." On closer inspection, though, Siri - even running on my expensive new phone - could do none of these useful things. In fact, it mostly seemed as banal as ever. And then, on 7 March, came an announcement from Apple: "We've also been working on a more personalised Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps. 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." For Gruber, who knows more about Apple than anyone I know, this was like a red rag to a bull. The announcement meant, he wrote, that "what Apple showed regarding the upcoming 'personalized Siri' at WWDC was not a demo. It was a concept video. Concept videos are bullshit, and a sign of a company in disarray, if not crisis". And because he has a long memory, it reminded him that the last time Apple had screened a concept video - the so-called "Knowledge Navigator" video - it was heading for bankruptcy. And it never made anything like it again once Steve Jobs had returned to turn it into the most profitable company in history. Until - says Gruber - now. Is he overreacting? Answer: yes. Apple isn't in crisis, but this mini-fiasco with Siri and Apple Intelligence looks like the first serious misstep in Tim Cook's stewardship of the company. If there's one thing Jobs' Apple was famous for, it was not announcing products before they were ready to ship. It's clear that the company grossly underestimated the amount of work needed to deliver on what it promised for Siri last June. If it had stuck to the Jobs playbook, the time to have launched the enhancement would have been June 2025 at the earliest. The company had clearly forgotten Hofstadter's Law: Everything takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law. A million monkeys... ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving is a marvellous essay by John Warner on AI and writing. Machines of loving grace? AI: A Means to an End or a Means to Our End? Read Stephen Fry's unmissable inaugural lecture to King's College London's Digital Futures Institute on the obsession du jour.

I'm actually glad the new Siri with Apple Intelligence is delayed, and here's why we've got Apple's AI problem backwards

What if we're considering the Apple Intelligence problem backwards? Apple's AI plans seem to be in shambles. It over-promised on upcoming iPhone features, partnered with questionable third party AI providers, and failed to deliver for so long that it's been forced to change plans entirely. There's even a lawsuit threat. We can blame Apple's leadership and question its commitment, but I think the problem isn't with Apple at all. The problem is with AI. As long as I've covered Apple, I've believed it won't release a product that hasn't reached a certain level of 'finish.' The original iPhone launched without GPS for navigation or video recording on the Camera app. However, it had the most complete and polished user interface ever on a smartphone, and Safari, a mobile web browser that was as advanced as a desktop browser, a feat that defied imagination. Even Apple Vision Pro, a product that underwhelmed critics, offered a fully-baked experience. Maybe Vision Pro didn't have enough features at launch to satisfy potential buyers, but the features it offered worked perfectly. And Vision Pro is the most highly-criticized Apple product in recent memory, well before Apple Intelligence imploded. Apple Intelligence made for a weird iPhone 16 launch in many ways. For longtime Apple users, it felt wildly out of character for the company. First, there was the ChatGPT partnership, which saw Apple offloading important features to an upstart, untested partner - loudly. That move set off some warning bells. Then, the iPhone launched, and billboards worldwide were plastered with marketing for Apple Intelligence. The new AI was the standard-bearer for the phone, the OS, and the whole company. New features - who? Camera Control button? Never heard of it. But the Apple Intelligence features weren't there! The features being advertised were mostly Coming Soon. Even today, I can't tell you how much of that Soon has actually arrived. It has always been unclear what is really coming soon and what will be coming in the distant future. Famously, an ad series featuring The Last of Us star Bella Ramsey seems to have disappeared from Apple's YouTube account. The ads featured Ramsey as they made decisions about their career, seemingly with advice from Apple Intelligence and the iPhone's ability to summarize emails and recall conversations. Ramsey relies on Apple Intelligence's interpretation of a character to decide whether to accept a part. When I saw those commercials, I felt kind of bad for Ramsey. I wouldn't make important job decisions based on an AI summary, and the Apple Intelligence commercials portrayed Ramsey as being kind of amateurish, far from the person I get when I see Ramsey in interviews. So now that the advertisement is gone, does that mean Apple Intelligence won't be reading my emails? Will it make suggestions for my next big Hollywood role? Will it help me make decisions about what job to take? I hope not because those are terrible reasons to use AI. The reason it was such a surprise when Apple announced that OpenAI's ChatGPT would provide answers for Apple Intelligence, and why it shouldn't be such a surprise that Apple Intelligence is flailing right now, is that no product could be less finished right now than AI. Apple launches polished products that are ready to impress. There has rarely been a less impressive product than artificial intelligence on smartphones. For two years, we have heard phone makers promise features that haven't arrived or promote features that are offensively bad. My smartphone AI still can't read my email and make a football team calendar based on the emails I get from my kid's coach. That was a fundamental promise of AI. Instead, we get AI image generators that will offer bigoted and stereotypical images of people, violent images of copyrighted characters, or convincing images of fraud. Even the most basic AI feature isn't just bad; it's horrifying. The Apple Intelligence headline summary tool created fake headlines that were the complete opposite of the truth. When AI is spreading lies, it isn't just a bad feature we should ignore. It's a harmful feature that we must combat. So, Apple hasn't achieved its goals with Apple Intelligence. So what? We may have literally dodged a bullet. It was a mistake for Apple to over-promise on AI, but it won't be a mistake if Apple abandons a bad feature that offers no benefit and may instead cause harm. Why is that not obvious? Forget about the rat race of cheering for Apple to succeed or fail. Forget about the market frustration over a lack of innovation. We need to take a step back and ask whether these smartphone AI features are good or bad, and when a company like Apple puts its AI plans on hold, we should applaud its caution, not fault its lack of commitment.

With New Siri Delayed Indefinitely, Apple's AI Woes Spiral into a Full-blown Crisis

Apple and AI haven't had the smoothest relationship. First, the company faced relentless scrutiny for lagging behind in the AI race. Then, Apple's long-awaited entry into AI-powered experiences with Apple Intelligence, which was meant to be a turning point, instead became a source of constant frustration. What was meant to be a triumphant debut of Apple Intelligence turned into a logistical nightmare, with delays, fragmented rollouts, and underwhelming features tainting the company's reputation for seamless execution. Apple's one hope at turning the narrative around was the release of an AI-powered Siri. Now, with the latest delay in Siri's AI makeover -- pushing the update to at least 2026 -- Apple finds itself in a crisis unlike any before. From the outset, Apple Intelligence has struggled. Not only was Apple late to the party, but most of the Apple Intelligence features the company promised garnered an underwhelming response. There wasn't anything truly revolutionary in there. Features like Writing tools, Image Playground, and Clean Up fell into the "been there, done that" categories. Still, there's always been an unspoken expectation when it comes to such features that even if Apple is late, its execution will more than make up for it. However, with Apple Intelligence, even that expectation has fallen flat. Unlike the polished, timely releases Apple is known for, AI features have been plagued by delays and inconsistencies, making for a disjointed user experience. Even after nearly a year, Apple Intelligence remains incomplete and inconsistent, making its debut one of Apple's most turbulent rollouts in recent history. The fragmented rollout of Apple Intelligence features hasn't been the only problem plaguing Apple's AI. In fact, far from it. By far, with all the Apple Intelligence features the company has shipped, it has failed to roll out anything that's impacted the users' lives in a meaningful manner. Not everything about Apple Intelligence is a disappointment. Features like Writing Tools have provided a privacy-conscious alternative to AI-assisted writing, and priority notifications have added some utility to the AI experience. But beyond these few successes, Apple Intelligence remains largely forgettable. Another feature -- Notification summaries -- is sort of steeped in a bit of controversy, much like most of Apple Intelligence at this point. While notification summaries can help users quickly scan their alerts, their AI-driven interpretation isn't always reliable. Notification summaries aren't useless; in fact, far from it. But there's also the fact that notification summaries have led to some huge mess-ups. Summaries struggle especially with text messages that tend to be more informal and can even be too literal, which an artificial intelligence model needs to better cope with. At other times, summaries have outright led to notifications, especially for news apps, that change the whole meaning of the news. It's one of the reasons Apple has disabled notification summaries for news apps for the time being. Features like Image Playground and Genmoji work fine, but none of the features bring anything meaningful to the table. For the most part, you might forget about their existence after toying with them for a while. One feature for which most people, including me, were most excited about, other than the new Siri, was the Clean Up tool. It's something that could have helped people out in their daily lives, that is, if it worked as well as it should have. Clean Up struggles with even simple edits, making it feel like an afterthought rather than a true AI-powered enhancement. In contrast, Google's Pixel or Samsung's S25 already offer a version of this feature that shows what's truly possible. Google's Magic Eraser is even available on older iPhones, and it performs significantly better than Clean Up, removing objects cleanly without distortions. So, why can't Apple step up? However, as if all the constant disappointment around Apple Intelligence wasn't enough, Apple dropped an even bigger bomb in the midst of it all. In hindsight, all the constant letdowns should have been a signal for the biggest disappointment around Apple Intelligence feature -- Siri's delay. While there were rumors going around that the updates to Siri might arrive with iOS 18.4 in April, Apple pulled the rug from under its users last Friday when the company confirmed that Siri's AI overhaul has been delayed indefinitely. While the company wants to ship these features by at least the release of iOS 19 later in 2025 -- and yes, the "at least" part is important -- there is no clear timeline for when (or if) Apple will be able to deliver on its vision. Apple promised a new era for Siri with Apple Intelligence -- one that would make the virtual assistant truly useful. Users have been asking for this overhaul for years. And after neglecting Siri's potential for far too long, it seemed like Apple was finally listening. With the updates, Siri was supposed to become an indispensable assistant capable of seamlessly integrating with users' daily lives, helping with anything and everything around your device, thanks to new abilities like contextual understanding, on-screen awareness, and in-app actions. The improvements for Siri that Apple showcased at the WWDC 2024 last June were truly impressive. With a simple prompt like "When is Mom's flight arriving?" Siri could understand who you meant by "Mom", get her flight information from your emails, cross-check it against real-time information for that flight, and tell you the exact time your mother's flight would land. After spending years in a stasis, it looked like Siri would finally bloom and step into its potential. And this example was only the tip of the iceberg. With Siri's abilities to take actions in and across your apps, it finally felt like the average user had a reason to care about all the hype around AI. Apple's promise to deliver "AI for the rest of us" made sense. Undoubtedly, Siri's makeover was an ambitious take on Apple's part. Yet the company promised the features with a confidence that did not indicate, not even once, the possibility that the features didn't already exist and were almost ready to be shipped. But I'm left with this question: While Mark Gurman's report suggests that the new personalized Siri works, many Apple fans, including myself, are now taking this information with a grain of salt. It's been 10 months since the WWDC 2024 keynote and there's not a single demo for this new and improved Siri that has been shown to the public. If a feature works 80% of the time, can it at least not be demoed? Even John Gruber of Daring Fireball calls it "vaporware". No one outside of Apple can vouch for its existence, and that should raise concerns. It can be argued that Apple, ever since its post-NeXT-reunification era, has followed a rule of not publishing concept videos. So, perhaps we should give them the benefit of the doubt and believe that the LLM Siri really does exist as more than a concept, and the only obstacle standing in the way of shipping it is to get it working 100% of the time. But it can also be argued that the Apple that hasn't published concept videos in decades was also an Apple that has never had to worry about falling behind in any sort of technology race. However, the era of AI changed that, and it can be argued that the company found itself in uncharted waters for the first time in a long time. It wouldn't be so hard to believe that this was indeed a company scrambling to appease its shareholders. Delays to the personalized Siri have now even led to delays in the release of Apple's smart home hub, which some refer to as HomePad, because it reportedly relies on the new App Intent features with Siri. According to a private meeting held by the Siri team, reports of which were shared by Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, the new personalized Siri is nowhere near ready to be shipped even now. According to the report, the AI-powered assistant reportedly works only 60-80% of the time, meaning that in about one-third of interactions, it simply fails. In lieu of these numbers, Apple has decided to postpone the launch since the company only wants to ship a feature that users can really count on. There doesn't seem to be much else of a fallout from the all-hands meeting with the Siri team. Currently, the reports suggest that Apple doesn't plan on firing any executives, but that could change in the future. However, this doesn't mean there isn't a sense of urgency at the company. Reportedly, more executives are being shuffled under John Giannandra, the head of AI at Apple, to assist with the AI crisis and turn the situation around. The company's AI efforts are also going to be the focus of the discussion at the major offsite exec meeting happening later this week. The problem with new Siri's delay isn't only a question of not getting the features we want. Even if the new Siri exists as more than just a concept and Apple can deliver it in 2026, by the time it arrives, will it already be too late? The contextualized Siri was the highlight of Apple's AI efforts. Siri has long suffered at the hands of Apple's negligence -- from being one of the first and best virtual assistants to exist, to becoming an obsolete afterthought. With the WWDC announcement, Siri finally felt like it could again claim a place in the lead. But while Apple has been struggling to get its AI ducks in a row, Apple's competitors have been shipping out steady updates to improve their assistants. Google is already tossing out Google Assistant in favor of Gemini on Android. Google's Gemini is rapidly evolving, offering conversational AI that feels more intuitive and context-aware. It can even perform actions on your Android phone like a true assistant. Even Samsung's Bixby has come a long way. Samsung's Galaxy AI can now take natural language prompts like "My eyes hurt" and intuitively suggest options to reach display settings. Meanwhile, Apple's settings app is struggling to even return results for simple searches like "Messages" sometimes. You can forget natural language searches anytime soon on your iPhone. With ChatGPT and Gemini showing us what AI assistants can truly be capable of, what will keep Apple and Siri in the race? Even Apple's ChatGPT integration in Siri offers such a disjointed experience that it can hardly make a difference. Perhaps Apple should forget about trying to develop its in-house LLM and just buy OpenAI. How else would they close the increasing gap with their competitors seems like an impossible question to me. The company is now facing a full-blown crisis that extends beyond the crashing of its stocks and disappointing its shareholders. It's facing a crisis of faith from even its most ardent fans. There's no doubt that Apple is now trying to contain this dumpster fire. Along with putting out the statement about the delays in new Siri, Apple has now also put up disclaimers about the delay on their website and (silently) pulled an iPhone 16 ad showcasing the Siri features from YouTube. To be honest, it was a grave mistake on Apple's part to market the iPhone 16 lineup with Apple Intelligence features, especially the Siri overhaul, when the phone otherwise lacked major changes. It was a gross violation of the trust users put into the company to promote a feature that was not ready to be shipped, even months later. If Apple wants to regain trust, it needs to give more than a statement or put up disclaimers on its website. I'm not asking them to ship a half-baked product; we've already had a lot of those since iOS 18. But there needs to be more transparency around what's going on and at least some demonstrations to prove that the new Siri really does exist as something more than a concept. On top of that, Apple is now also reportedly planning a major redesign with iOS 19, iPadOS 19, and macOS 16. At present, it feels like the company is hoping to distract users from its AI fails by dangling a shiny new redesign in front of them. However, if this redesign doesn't include major changes under the hood to incorporate Apple Intelligence at the OS level, maybe Apple should just forget about it. There's no amount of changes at the UI level that would make up for the absolute circus AI at Apple has turned into.