Given its plans to overhaul Siri to fit the generative AI era have not gone well, reports the company is switching up the playbook is potentially positive news for Apple fans.
Bloomberg reports the recently-appointed Siri lead at Apple is shaking things up and bringing the team that managed to get Apple’s other first-time product – the Vision Pro headset – to market.
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Mark Gurman says Mike Rockwell (who has reportedly replaced John Giannandrea as the man leading the assistant’s charge in the future), is bringing in trusted lieutenants to get the long-planned overhaul into ship-shape for a public launch later this year.
“The moves show that Rockwell is either demoting or replacing the prior managers in charge of Siri engineering,” Gurman writes.
“At the same time, he is turning to the people behind the Vision Pro to fix the long-plagued voice assistant.”
Apple has pushed the big overhaul of Siri way back, only committing to the prospect of it arriving on the best iPhone models “in the next year”, when commenting on the matter in March this year.
“We’ve also been working on a more personalised Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps, Apple said on March 7. “It’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year.”
Apple has copped some serious flak over the delays in recent weeks with reports suggesting Apple had fabricated the promotional materials it used to demo the features at WWDC 24 last June.
Opinion
The Vision Pro will have been one of the hardest Apple products for the company to get over the line. Probably a decade in development, tens of billions of dollars spent in the process and lots of brand new technologies for Apple to invent and perfect along the way. Siri represents a different problem, but it makes sense for the company to turn to the team with a record of getting the tough to achieve products to market.
