Lack of ambition and organizational dysfunction are attributed to some causes of Siri’s failure!
These days unanimity does not seem easy to obtain at Apple. Just a few weeks ago alleged internal conflicts between the company’s teams were revealed, due to the launch of the mixed reality glasses, but differences like this started years ago, but they had Siri as the protagonist.
A new detailed report shared by The Information, assures that the arrival of options such as the famous and controversial ChatGPT has left Apple’s virtual assistant in a bad light and it is not the competition that says it, but Apple’s internal sources.
No consensus with Siri
According to the investigation, several Apple insiders alleged that lack of ambition and organizational dysfunction are the main causes of Siri’s failure and other technologies related to artificial intelligence. And it is that, as happens with many users, within the company, Apple’s virtual assistant is “widely ridiculed” within the company for its lack of functionality and its minimal improvement over time. time.
The report assures that by 2018, the team working on Siri had apparently “turned into a mess”fueled by petty turf battles between key leaders and heated discussions about the direction of the assistant.” The same sources claim that the data obtained on Siri from the data science and engineering team was not all simply not used, and some former employees called it “a waste of time and money”.
Siri is still not what Apple expects
It is said that Many Apple employees have left the company due to its slow decision-making and conservative approach to new AI technologies., including the long language models that are the basis of chatbots like ChatGPT. Apple CEO Tim Cook personally tried to convince engineers who had helped modernize Apple’s search technology to stay with the company before working on long language models at Google.
Besides, Apple executives reportedly reject proposals to give Siri the ability to carry long back-and-forth conversations, could be difficult to control and misleading. So Cook and other senior executives have requested changes to Siri to avoid awkward responses, and the company prefers Siri responses to be pre-written by a team of around 20 writers, rather than generated by artificial intelligence. .
In the work team, meetings between Siri engineers and designers focused on convincing seconds that not all answers needed human verification
A new Siri
One of the latest efforts was in 2019, when the Siri team explored a project to rewrite the virtual assistant from scratchwhose code name is “Blackbird”. It was a stripped-down version of Siri that delegated feature creation to app developers and ran on iPhones instead of the cloud.
Over time, “Blackbird” executives pushed their own project, named “SiriX”, for the tenth anniversary of the virtual assistant. The project simply aimed to move Siri processing to the device for privacy reasons, without the lightweight and modular functionality of Blackbird.
More recently, engineers tested how Siri works to control Apple Reality Pros, but unsurprisingly with disappointing results.
