In a classic Friday news dump last week, Apple announced that it would postpone plans to add artificial intelligence capabilities to its voice assistant Siri. This was a very embarrassing announcement. However, that announcement did more than just cause the stock price to plummet. A recent Bloomberg report claims that it has also led to a decline in morale among its Siri team. According to an inside report on Apple’s problems, senior director Robby Walker of the company’s Siri division called an all-hands meeting and admitted that things were…not great. He admitted that the entire situation could make team members feel irate, ashamed, and exhausted. He allegedly remarked, “It doesn’t feel good when your friends, family, or coworkers ask you what happened.”
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Indeed, it appears that there is no precise timeframe for their arrival. According to reports, Walker informed the team that although Apple would prefer that their new intelligence features be released concurrently with the release of iOS 19, which is anticipated to happen this summer, this “doesn’t mean that we’re shipping then.” As of right now, according to Bloomberg, the in-progress Siri feature only functions as intended between two-thirds and 80% of the time. This sounds dreadfully inadequate, and if you know anything about Siri, you know that it functions about as well as it does now. Even though it’s painful and embarrassing to miss a deadline, perhaps the Siri team should find comfort in the fact that most people aren’t actually missing those promised features.
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Siri and other voice assistants, however, seem like a logical use case for artificial intelligence. The length of time it has taken for businesses to actually integrate it is surprising. This issue is not unique to Apple. Amazon only revealed AI-powered features for its Alexa voice assistant last month, and even those are being delayed as the company only releases them on a small number of devices at this time. Despite all the hype, it appears that attracting customers to use AI is more difficult than it first appears.