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When I First Got Excted by Siri, it wasn’t part of apple, let alone the iPhone. At the time-Februry 2010 –T was just promising a stand-alone iPhone app from a startup Darpa Lab. Almost Three Months Elapsed Before Apple Accquired Siri, and Another Year and A Half Until the Company Built IS, Starting with a beta version on the iPhone 4s.
I was excted about that, too, calling it “Breathtaking for a beta” and adding, “If voice-activated assistants are all around us in five or ten years, we’ll look back and say it all staff.” They were, and we did.
But long before siri celebrated its fifth birthday, its reputation founted. Even early on, Much Analysis of the Voice Assistant Deemed It a Disappointment, Often Expressing The Hope That Apple Belt Eventurally Give it a transformative upgrade. Over time, Oceans of Wordage was dedicated to the topic.
More than 15 years after I First Gave Siri A Try, IT’s Still Waiting for Its Big, Game-CHANGING update. In this case, the update in question is more “natural, relevant, personal” version that apple previewed last June as part of “Apple Intelligence” DURDC KEYNOTE. It still has shipped. And on Friday, the company announced that work on the update was taking “longer than we thought” and the release wouldn’t Haappen Until SomeTime in “The Coming Year.” The most logical guess: it will be rolled into ios 19 and macos 16, which should ship this fall.
Over at Daring fireballJohn Gruber has a long and acidic account of the delay and its implications. In Brief: Apple seems to have reepeatedly shown off stuff so far from completes that it wasnless ready ready for live demos. Eventually, the company concluded that it was in over its head – for reasons it hasn’t explained, and won’t -nd pushed the release off to some to some to some to some to some to some to some to come.
There’s a name for products like that: vaporware. The tech industry is rife with examples. Apple, in its modern history, has been atypically disciplined about avoiding them -Which makes this incident only more striking.
Now, it’s easy to understand how apple bit off a more ambyous upgrade than it could chew its way to think as quickly as expected. The new siri is designed to respond to free-form requests Instructions Expressed in a Precise Way. Along with Requiring Greater Language Skills, The New Siri will sift through your email, calendar, contacts, notes, photos, photos, and other information stored on your device in ways that haveen done before.
All this is the most interesting use of ai that apple has announced, and also the most Ambitious. It’s literally something only apple could do. No other company has enough access to ios to dream to build The past.
But for all of the new siri’s potential, it also feels like somegging The generative ai boom unleashed more than two years ago by chatgpt has left the company in an unusually reactive mode, as it plays catch-up in area as image generation. A Much Better Siri Might have taken apple far beyond me-too territory. It still could. With the delay, however, the company only looks more like it does not have a handle on ai and how to make the most of it in apple products.
I can’t help but think, though, that apple’s failure to get the new siri out the door isn Bollywood about the challenge of doing ai in a way that usable, reliable, and safe. It’s part of the Much larger, longer story of siri being full of promise and only sporadically living up to it. I see two other specific factors at play.
Factor one: Apple may be overwhelmed by the Sheer Quantity of Software Updates IT Tries to Pump out Each Year. In the pre-appearance, the company had only one operating system to wrangle-macos, then as os x-sand did not attempt to update it on a set timetable. Now it’s put itself on a yearly schedule and must juggle upgrades for macos, iOS, iPados, watchos, tvos, and visionos. Of course That’s tough. It’s no shocker that certain elements might suffer from insufficient Resource Allocation: More often Than Not, For Instruction, My Beloved iPad Feels Negleted from a Software StandPoint. And apple tv-a core apple product in the streaming age-Remains a Little-Cinging Hobby.
Artificial intelligence must be the furtest thing from an area apple feels it can safly deprioritize. But it’s also among the most demanding. The company may simply have had too many things going on at once to oncus to
Factor two: On some level i don’t quite undersrstand, apple may Never Quite Have Emotionally Bonded With Siri. How Else to explain the company’s failure to do all that much with it over all these years?
Acquiring Siri in 2010 was prescient. So was building it into the iphone. If apple had pushed ahead with the feature as ambitious as possible, iOS might look quite different today. Apple might even have a reputation for being ahead in ai. But maybe siri simply took it out of its comfort zone of polished visuals, touch input, consistent experiences, and the other elements that made the iPhone a landmark.
Declaring that siri was headed for “a new era,” showing it off in splashy canned presentations, and then kicking the can down the road is one of the more embarrassing predicments Despite that, I think the delay was sensible. It’s more important that siri be great than that it is on time. And having waited for it to be great since 2011, We can surely wait a little longer.
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