Siri / Depositphotos
The company is trying to include some AI-based features in iOS 19 that were announced last June, but there are big problems with this.
Recently Apple is criticized for slow progress in everything related to artificial intelligence and Siri. The company has officially postponed the functions of modernizing Siri and giving its products the necessary impetus in the AI race. It is not known exactly when the full-fledged Apple Intelligence will be available, and it seems that the company does not know.
Mark Gurman of Bloomberg reports on what happened at a Siri team meeting led by its leader, Senior Director Robby Walker. He called the delay an «ugly» situation and sympathized with employees who may be feeling burned out or frustrated by Apple’s decisions and Siri’s poor reputation. He said it is unknown whether the missing Siri features will appear in iOS 19 this year. This is the company’s current goal, but «does not mean that we will release» at that time.
«We have other commitments at Apple to other projects. We want to honor our commitments to them, and we understand that they are potentially more urgent now than the features that have been delayed,» Walker said.
The information hints at a tense relationship between Apple’s Siri division and the marketing department. Walker noted that the communications team wanted to emphasize Siri’s personal contextual awareness features and its ability to act on what is currently displayed on the screen without prior preparation. Walker acknowledged that promises and expectations of customers through them only made the situation worse.
Apple then removed the iPhone 16 ad, which demonstrated these functionsand added a warning to several sections of the official website that all of them are postponed to a date to be specified. According to Mark Gurman, their implementation is hampered by the quality of Apple’s AI tools, which «did not work properly up to a third of the time».
«Customers expect not only new features, but also want a more complete Siri. We’re going to roll out these and other features as soon as they’re ready… They’re not quite ready for the general public yet, even though our competitors may have launched them in this state or worse,» Walker says.
Last week, Apple said that the rollout of Siri’s advanced features was taking longer than expected. But Walker told his employees, software chief Craig Federighi and artificial intelligence chief John Giannandrea, are taking «acute personal responsibility» for the predicament, which has been drawing fierce criticism as months pass without change, except for better Siri animations.