New Siri chief is replacing existing teams with Vision Pro staffers

AppleInsider

Mike Rockwell, the new head of Siri, is reportedly turning over much of the development work to his previous team for Apple Vision Pro.

Efforts to update Siri with Apple Intelligence are now falling to Apple Vision Pro teams

First Apple "fixer" Kim Vorrath moved to the Siri team, then previous head John Giannandrea was abruptly replaced by Apple Vision Pro chief Rockwell. Now, according to Bloomberg, Rockwell has restructured the Siri team specifically to bring in people from his Vision Pro work.

The restructuring has begun with Ranjit Desai, being placed in charge of the underlying Siri system group. Rockwell reportedly told staff that Desai would help Siri reach a "new level" because of his knowledge of "high-performance, low-latency systems."

Olivier Gutknecht is taking over the user experience team, having also previously been a senior executive on the development of the Apple Vision Pro. Nate Begeman, who worked on visionOS, is to work on underlying architecture, as is Tom Duffy, previously on the iPhone's Core OS team.

Then former Tesla executive Stuart Bowers, is moving from Apple Vision Pro data, training and evaluation teams, to working on Siri's user responses. David Winarsky, who has been with Siri for a long time, will take over a new team concentrating on speech.

Overall, the existing Siri team appears to be being pushed out or at least sidelined, in favor of people who worked on the better-received Apple Vision Pro. Mike Rockwell has not entirely left the headset behind, though, as he remains also in charge of the visionOS team.

The shakeup follows an alleged decade-long series of managerial failures with Siri, which has embarrassed Apple.

Apple has delayed the release of the much-promised new version of Siri using Apple Intelligence, which was once expected to come in iOS 18.4 in 2025. It's now said to be coming late in the year, or early in 2026.

Alongside the failure to update Siri with the announced Apple Intelligence features, Apple has also somehow managed to make the existing Siri noticeably much worse.



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twolf2919

Not sure how "knowledge of high-performance, low-latency systems" qualifies you to lead an AI effort where the problem isn't really performance but lack of "I".

apple4thewin

“OK, let me just jump in, restart everything, and maybe you guys can get your act together when I am done.”

pixeltini

Hmm. Reorganizing in order to become more efficient and effective. What a concept. I wonder why government at every level doesn't do the same as private business.

entropys

pixeltini said:

Hmm. Reorganizing in order to become more efficient and effective. What a concept. I wonder why government at every level doesn't do the same as private business.

Bad apparently.

mattinoz

twolf2919 said:

Not sure how "knowledge of high-performance, low-latency systems" qualifies you to lead an AI effort where the problem isn't really performance but lack of "I".

Because quick multi threaded thinkers can process more parts of the problem to get to an answer sooner and assistances only have a fixed time window to respond or people will not use them. 

stabitha_christie

pixeltini said:

Hmm. Reorganizing in order to become more efficient and effective. What a concept. I wonder why government at every level doesn't do the same as private business.

Because government isn't a private business aren't the same thing. Also, Apple isn't a private business it's publicly owned.

9secondkox2

pixeltini said:

Hmm. Reorganizing in order to become more efficient and effective. What a concept. I wonder why government at every level doesn't do the same as private business.

Looks like it's happening these days at least for a few months. But it boggles how it's not been done before. apple has reorganized a few times and seems to be pretty nimble and efficient for so massive a company. the excess cruft is what bloats an organization. Look at how Microsoft Windows used to be developed as a lesson in inefficiency. A little spring cleaning never hurt anyone.

bloggerblog

I wish Siri can at least read a document or a website  out loud. I can’t believe we’re still using the voices from the 1980!!

forumpost

Juggling two eggs at the same time. What can go wrong, eh?

bulk001

And what happens to Vision when their best employees are moved? The same fate as Siri? Seems like it was a fools errand to start with but maybe like Watson it will rise again?