Ex-Apple employees told why Siri is not developing

Former Apple employees anonymously spoke about the problems they encountered during the development of Siri. In total, Info journalist Wayne Ma spoke to 30 workers.

▪️ By 2018, the download that Siri was developing was “a mess caused by petty skirmishes between senior executives and heated arguments over the direction of development.”

▪️Managers didn’t want to spend money on creating tools to analyze ‌Siri‌ usage. The engineers couldn’t get even simple statistics like how many people use Siri and how often they do so.

▪️ Many Apple employees abandoned the company because they thought too slowly and were too conservative with artificial intelligence technology, including the new language models that underpin chatbots like ChatGPT.

▪️ Apple CEO Tim Cook personally confirmed to convince the engineers who modernized the search structure to stay with the company. But in the end they moved to Google.

▪️ Apple management refused to include contextual understanding in Siri for using a conversation, citing that this feature would be difficult to control and would be useless.

▪️ Apple’s uncompromising stance on privacy has hindered the improvement of Siri, because the company has gone out of its way to ensure that many of the assistant’s functions run on productivity.

▪️ Tim Cook and other top executives insisted that Siri use pre-prepared responses rather than relying on artificial intelligence. They are written by a team of about 20 editors.

▪️ Apple deliberately excluded iPhone pricing information from Siri responses so that applications would immediately go to the site.

▪️ In 2019, engineers replaced months to convince designers that it is not necessary to check every Siri response that used information from the Internet.

▪️ The designers refused to allow users to report problems in Siri responses because they wanted it to appear to be an all-knowing assistant.

▪️ In 2019, the developers rewrote the Siri code from scratch. The project was called Blackbird. It was a light version of Siri that ran entirely on the iPhone for productivity and privacy, and delegated functionality to app developers.

▪️ The Blackbird demo caused an arrest among some Apple employees due to its usefulness and responsiveness.

▪️ Blackbird competed with the project of two old Siri sensors. They promoted their own project called Siri X, which was dedicated to the 10th anniversary of the assistant. Siri X brought an on-device assistant experience without Blackbird’s lightweight, modular feature.

▪️ The owners of the company working on Blackbird were involved in Siri X. The project was completed in 2021 and is currently part of iOS.

▪️ Engineers developing mixed reality glasses were frustrated by the demonstration of how Siri can control what is implemented. They considered creating an alternative control method using voice commands because Siri’s performance was found to be unsatisfactory.

Rumor has it that Apple is testing Siri, which gets answers on its own, rather than relying on ready-made templates. Apple may also introduce Siri animations in the Dynamic Island cutout.