Apple's Siri history was plagued by infighting, mistakes and developer alienation, report ...
With dissatisfaction with Siri threatening to hurt various product lines now, several former employees on the Siri team have spoken out about blunders that took place during the rolling out of the technology back in 2011, as well as infighting and turf battles afterward.
According to a piece published Wednesday on technology site The Information, the company rushed Siri's technological development, leading to problems still being felt today. The account cited a dozen former Apple employees, all speaking anonymously as to avoid breaching confidentiality agreements.
Multiple sources told The Information that Apple "rushed Siri into the iPhone 4s before the technology was fully baked," leading to debates about "whether to continue patching up a flawed build or to rip it up and start from scratch."
Also alleged is that the Siri team leadership has been a revolving door, without any strong vision backing the product, and that the product's significant ambitions have been scaled down over time. Apple CEO Steve Jobs was cited as a reason for the confusion, as he spawned champions within the company that continued to advocate for the technology being done his way, even after the executive passed away the day after Siri was unveiled in October 2011.
The piece also reveals that a major breakdown of the software took place shortly after its launch. Further infighting led the technology's co-founders to leave Apple in the first couple of years of the product. Some of them founded a rival company, Viv Labs, but were later banned from Apple's campus, once brass realized they were continuing to visit Cupertino to play basketball with their former colleagues.
While Siri, due to the iPhone's ubiquity, is likely used by more users than Amazon's Alexa or Google Assistant, it has failed to capitalize on developer innovation in the way that Alexa has. Many of the original Siri team had hoped Siri would lead to "an App Store for AI," but that never quite shook out that way. SiriKit was ultimately unveiled in 2016, even as Amazon eventually drew much greater developer interest.
Fallout from the infighting and confusion persists. As AppleInsider and other publications noted in HomePod reviews earlier this year, Siri functionality is "lacking" in the device, compared with Alexa and other competitors.
According to a piece published Wednesday on technology site The Information, the company rushed Siri's technological development, leading to problems still being felt today. The account cited a dozen former Apple employees, all speaking anonymously as to avoid breaching confidentiality agreements.
Multiple sources told The Information that Apple "rushed Siri into the iPhone 4s before the technology was fully baked," leading to debates about "whether to continue patching up a flawed build or to rip it up and start from scratch."
Also alleged is that the Siri team leadership has been a revolving door, without any strong vision backing the product, and that the product's significant ambitions have been scaled down over time. Apple CEO Steve Jobs was cited as a reason for the confusion, as he spawned champions within the company that continued to advocate for the technology being done his way, even after the executive passed away the day after Siri was unveiled in October 2011.
The piece also reveals that a major breakdown of the software took place shortly after its launch. Further infighting led the technology's co-founders to leave Apple in the first couple of years of the product. Some of them founded a rival company, Viv Labs, but were later banned from Apple's campus, once brass realized they were continuing to visit Cupertino to play basketball with their former colleagues.
While Siri, due to the iPhone's ubiquity, is likely used by more users than Amazon's Alexa or Google Assistant, it has failed to capitalize on developer innovation in the way that Alexa has. Many of the original Siri team had hoped Siri would lead to "an App Store for AI," but that never quite shook out that way. SiriKit was ultimately unveiled in 2016, even as Amazon eventually drew much greater developer interest.
Fallout from the infighting and confusion persists. As AppleInsider and other publications noted in HomePod reviews earlier this year, Siri functionality is "lacking" in the device, compared with Alexa and other competitors.
Comments
To avoid breaching the agreement? Actually it's to avoid getting caught breaching the agreement, since they all breached the agreement.
And people still use it for useless things like timers only.
So I would say Siri is doing just fine.
Isn't is amazing how the the clickbait, hit-piece, troll magnet trash reports have come from former employees? yeah, let's all take these at face value. In this case, the report is highlighted by people fired 7 years ago, who clearly have zero clue or insight as to Siri's current development details.
Oh, and Siri has always worked fine for me, and it's only improved over time. Depends on everyone's use case, but for what use it for (basic info checks, timers, reminders, weather, scores, controlling my lights, etc) I've never had any real issue with it, apart from the periodic, universal imperfections of audio recognition and connectivity. Because of the infinite variabilities in accents and context, voice assistants will ALWAYS be limited until they can read your minds. Even if Alexa or Google are slightly better in some respects, I have no desire to introduce these ecosystems into my home.
But I still do not use it for anything except timers & convertions.
Siri sucks. I stopped using it completely because generally I would get annoyed after trying to make it work a second time, utlimately just doing it myself.
I had a much better experience with google now on an android which I used for a couple months. The voice recognition was pretty good.
"Several former employees said (Apple) made a number of decisions that the rest of the team disagreed with, including a plan to improve Siri’s capabilities only once a year. That was the approach Apple typically employed with iOS... they argued in vain that that model was wrong for Siri, which they believed needed to be an online service that continuously improved, not updated annually...
"[Siri is] not in the search area,” Mr. Jobs said. “They’re in the AI area. … We have no plans to go into the search business. That's not something we know about. It's not something we care deeply about. Other people do it well.”
Still, a quality search apparatus is a critical component to creating a useful digital assistant. When a user asks a question, the AI needs to tap into a source of knowledge and quickly identify the right response."
Apple has of course made other purchases in the years since meant to bolster Siri capabilities.
"In October 2013, (Apple) bought Cue for over $40 million... The startup had built a personal assistant app that searched through a user's emails to spit out a personal agenda.
Apple made another big acquisition in 2013 by purchasing Topsy for more than $200 million. The Topsy technology was acquired to be used in Spotlight...
The Topsy team ultimately grew into a massive organization... that now nearly rivals the number of employees on the Siri team.
Members of the Topsy team expressed a reluctance to work with a Siri team they viewed as slow and bogged down by the initial infrastructure that had been patched up but never completely replaced since it launched.
“There was a feeling that, ‘Why don’t we just start over and build what we need to build, and then worry about reconciling those two later?’”
"Core Siri and Spotlight are powered by a combination of both Topsy's technology and Siri Data Services, which is based on older search technology ported over from iTunes search but modified for Siri and launched in 2013... Siri Data Services deals with things like Wikipedia, stocks and movie showtimes, while Topsy sorts through Twitter, news and web results. The Siri Data Services team was eventually lumped into the Topsy team... with the plan to integrate all of the tech into a single stack. But they're based on two different programming languages and are tricky to reconcile."
"The difficulty integrating the search teams led to some embarrassing outcomes. Users could get completely different responses to the same question based on whether they were using Siri or Spotlight—which were powered by two different search technologies built by two different teams."
In October 2015 (Apple acquired) VocalIQ. Apple has successfully integrated the VocalIQ technology into Siri's calendar capabilities, sources familiar with the project said.
In a sign of how unprepared Apple was to deal with a rivalry, (the Siri team) didn’t even learn about Apple’s HomePod project until 2015—after Amazon unveiled the Echo in late 2014. One of Apple’s original plans was to launch its speaker without Siri included...
But the most notable failure in Siri’s evolution is that it still lacks the third-party developer ecosystem considered the key element of the original Siri vision. Apple finally launched SiriKit in 2016 after years of setting aside the project .... Apple had been working on a developer kit off and on since 2012.
So far it includes just 10 activities—Apple calls them “intent domains”—such as payments, booking rides, setting up to-do lists and looking at photos. Several senior engineers who worked on SiriKit have left Apple or moved off the project.
Among all these challenges, former Siri members noted that while Apple has tried to remake itself as a services company, its core is still product design.
“The structure of Apple works against those efforts”
And there seems to be no way to keep it from sticking Spanish words into my English writing just because I have the Spanish keyboard enabled.
As Doctor Who (the real one, Tom Baker) once out it, “Computers are very sophisticated idiots.”