Apple Overpromised on AI Siri and Its Staff Is Not Happy About it

Last week, in a classic Friday news dump, Apple made the deeply embarrassing announcement that it would be delaying plans to infuse its voice assistant Siri with artificial intelligence-powered capabilities. However, the price of its stock also fell as a result of that announcement. A recent Bloomberg report claims that it has also shattered the morale of its Siri team. Per the inside account of Apple’s issues, Robby Walker, a senior director in Apple’s Siri division, held an all-hands meeting for the team and acknowledged that things were…not great. He acknowledged that the circumstance might make team members enraged, ashamed, and exhausted. “You might have co-workers or friends or family asking you what happened, and it doesn’t feel good,” he reportedly said, according to Bloomberg.
The apparent fact that Apple's marketing left the Siri team out in the cold is also unsettling. They started running ads promoting the features that would be available in the suped-up Siri last year, promising that it’d arrive by June of this year. One of the iPhone 16's main selling points was the inclusion of those features as part of the broader suite of Apple Intelligence features. The iPhone 16 didn't offer many other upgrades. However, those are currently absent. In fact, it seems there’s no clear timeline for when they actually will arrive. Despite Apple's desire for their new intelligence features to launch with iOS 19, which is expected to be available this summer, Walker reportedly informed the team that this "doesn't mean that we're shipping then." Currently, Bloomberg reports that the in-progress Siri feature only works the way it’s supposed to between two-thirds to 80% of the time—which both sounds woefully insufficient and, if you have any experience with Siri, is about in line with how well it already works.
The Siri team might want to take solace in the fact that the majority of people probably aren't missing those promised features all that much, even though missing a deadline is painful and embarrassing. 73% of iPhone owners said the company's new AI features "add little to no value," according to a survey conducted by SellCell in December 2024. That said, voice assistants like Siri kinda seem like a no-brainer application for artificial intelligence. It is surprising how long it has taken businesses to actually incorporate it. Apple isn’t alone in this problem. Amazon didn't announce AI-powered features for its Alexa voice assistant until last month, and even then, the company is introducing them to a limited number of devices for the time being. For all the hype AI generates, it seems like finding ways to get consumers to use it is harder than it may seem.