Exodus of original Siri team continues at Apple
Almost all of the talent Apple acquired from the original Siri team has reportedly left the company, with a pair of key departures having taken place in recent weeks.
Calling him "one of the last members of the original Siri team," The Information reported on Wednesday that Darren Haas has left Apple for General Electric. He'll join Steve D'Aurora, another ex-Siri team member who resigned from Apple for GE a few weeks ago.
The changeups also come a few days after a team of ex-Siri personnel unveiled Viv, a new, advanced virtual assistant that aims to offer functionality well beyond what Apple's Siri can currently do. Demonstrated tasks include ordering a car from Uber, buying flowers from FTD, and ordering tickets from a variety of services, and offer intelligent, contextual responses, such as alternatives when a showtime for a movie is sold out.
Haas's departure affirms an earlier rumor suggesting Apple's "head of cloud engineering" was on his way out the door. The Siri team is said to have clashed with management at Apple, and have particularly been at odds with the team that oversees Apple's iCloud services.
Apple apparently decided to extend the Siri cloud computing platform to include services under the iCloud team's banner, like iTunes and iMessages. That transition is said to have made some at Apple feel uneasy about job security.
Both Haas and D'Angelo were key acqui-hires that came on board through Apple's purchase of Siri in 2010. The tech developed by the company debuted on the iPhone 4s and is now integrated into all current iOS devices, serving functions from creating calendar entries to answering basic user inquiries.
However, Siri was meant to do much more than its current feature set as developed under Apple. Prior to the acquisition, Siri integrated with a number of e-commerce providers, ranging from movie tickets to food orders.
But Apple stripped away those partnerships, as a result of decisions made by late company co-founder Steve Jobs, according to Siri co-creator Dag Kittklaus. He, along with Adam Cheyer, have since left Apple to work on Viv.
Calling him "one of the last members of the original Siri team," The Information reported on Wednesday that Darren Haas has left Apple for General Electric. He'll join Steve D'Aurora, another ex-Siri team member who resigned from Apple for GE a few weeks ago.
The changeups also come a few days after a team of ex-Siri personnel unveiled Viv, a new, advanced virtual assistant that aims to offer functionality well beyond what Apple's Siri can currently do. Demonstrated tasks include ordering a car from Uber, buying flowers from FTD, and ordering tickets from a variety of services, and offer intelligent, contextual responses, such as alternatives when a showtime for a movie is sold out.
Haas's departure affirms an earlier rumor suggesting Apple's "head of cloud engineering" was on his way out the door. The Siri team is said to have clashed with management at Apple, and have particularly been at odds with the team that oversees Apple's iCloud services.
Apple apparently decided to extend the Siri cloud computing platform to include services under the iCloud team's banner, like iTunes and iMessages. That transition is said to have made some at Apple feel uneasy about job security.
Both Haas and D'Angelo were key acqui-hires that came on board through Apple's purchase of Siri in 2010. The tech developed by the company debuted on the iPhone 4s and is now integrated into all current iOS devices, serving functions from creating calendar entries to answering basic user inquiries.
However, Siri was meant to do much more than its current feature set as developed under Apple. Prior to the acquisition, Siri integrated with a number of e-commerce providers, ranging from movie tickets to food orders.
But Apple stripped away those partnerships, as a result of decisions made by late company co-founder Steve Jobs, according to Siri co-creator Dag Kittklaus. He, along with Adam Cheyer, have since left Apple to work on Viv.
Comments
What have the SIRI people been doing at Apple? They have 6 years to show for their work now, and is SIRI 6 years better than it was in 2010?
Seriously if they can improve Siri the reliance on outdated web searches would shrink tremendously.
I don't want to look up "nutrition for mature cats" and get thousands of useless pages ranging from Facebook profiles to people asking the same question on message boards with 0 replies.
I wanna ask Siri and be done with it. Let Giggle's evil empire be a spyware nightmare of the past.
Siri is quite good with some things though, like appointments, iMessage, launching apps, scientific questions, metric conversions and sports scores to name a few.
AI assistance is the future not sure why Apple seems to not give a f***. There's billions left on the table. My number 1 wish for iOS 10 is improved Siri. But it should be improved every iOS release.
Siri has been improved with each iOS update. I just think that we are becoming so used to fast-moving technology that we demand more and faster updates from Apple.
I, too, wish that Apple would have a more incremental update process... releasing smaller updates (publicly) throughout the year. Feed the need, rather than keeping the updates bottled up for an entire year and then doing a big release.
Based on recent evidence, I think that Siri is gearing up for a big update this year. With the service coming to Macs, Apple better be plowing new ground for on-device processing of the speech-to-text.
For such technologies which claim to replicate human's analog features maybe we should not try to "manage" people's expectations and should not try to "educate" them on how to obtain "meaningful database query results by composing optimally relevant natural language queries". This is what the actual Siri and all of its spin-offs require and this is counter-intuitive. This is why they are still "research" not "product".
A big insight of Steve Jobs had been IMHO to put Siri on its feet, by stripping it off all the unnecessary gimmicks and attractions, to give us a decent voice-based interaction method that does (or somewhat does) the job. As such, Siri is just part of a greater user experience, and nothing more. Strip off that larger user experience Siri is being a piece of and Siri will not survive.
Its not this site; it's the nature of "newsworthy."
Newsworthy isn't: everything is fine
Newsworthy is: woman running down street with throat cut.