Courtesy of Apple
Apple is opening up about why your iPhone doesn’t have a more personalized AI-powered Siri yet.
It’s a relatively rare example of the company speaking at greater length about a bruising setback months after it first issued a statement saying its development was taking “longer than we thought” and the AI feature would be delayed.
The saga began a year ago at Apple’s WWDC 2024 conference, where it introduced with much fanfare an overhauled version of Siri with new AI features.
Now, a year later, it’s still M.I.A. and Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, Craig Federighi, is speaking somewhat candidly in various interviews at this year’s WWDC event about what went wrong.
The short answer: Apple wants to get it right.
“When you have an experience like asking Siri to do something, either it becomes something you can depend on reliably or it’s something, in the end, you’re just not going to use,” Federighi told YouTuber iJustine.
With that in mind, Apple wasn’t “able to take the approach we were taking to the quality level in the time frame that initially we thought we could,” he continued.
However, work continues on building a more capable Siri that can remember the name of a guy you had lunch with months prior, the kind of situation shown off in a now-deleted ad from last year with “The Last of Us” actor Bella Ramsey. That version of Siri — Federighi called it V1 — was intended to arrive in December 2024 or spring 2025, he told TechRadar.
“Version one we had working here at the time that we were getting close to the conference, and had, at the time, high confidence that we could deliver it,” Federighi told the publication.
When the company realized that version wouldn’t “meet our customer expectations or Apple standards” on the timeline it had planned, it pivoted to focusing on V2 and officially announced the delay in March, according to the Apple exec. Federighi described V2 as “a deeper end-to-end architecture that we knew was ultimately what we wanted to create, to get to a full set of capabilities that we wanted for Siri.”
Apple didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment by Business Insider.
“We have, you know, the V2 architecture, of course, working in-house, but we’re not yet to the point where it’s delivering at the quality level that I think makes it a great Apple feature, and so we’re not announcing the date for when that’s happening,” Federighi told TechRadar.
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