Do you have any evidence to suggest the engineers believed that?

The original founders realised the weakness of Siri and started a machine learning based assistent which they sold to Samsung. Apple could have taken the same route but didn't.

So you're saying the engineers were totally grounded and apple business leadership was not.

13 years of engineering failure.

The technology wasn’t there to be a general purpose assistant. Much closer to reality now and I have found finally Siri not to be totally terrible.

My overall impression using Siri daily for many years (mainly for controlling smart lights, turning Tv on/off, setting timers/alarms), is that Siri is artificially dumbed down to never respond with an incorrect answer.

When it says “please open iPhone to see the results” - half the time I think it’s capable of responding with something but Apple would rather it not.

I’ve always seen Siri’s limitations as a business decision by Apple rather than a technical feat that couldn’t be solved. (Although maybe it’s something that couldn’t be solved to Apple’s standards)

I mean, there are videos from when Siri was launched [1] with folks at Apple calling it intelligent and proudly demonstrating that if you asked it whether you need a raincoat, it would check the weather forecast and give you an answer - demonstrating conceptual understanding, not just responding to a 'weather' keyword. With senior folk saying "I've been in the AI field a long time, and this still blows me away."

So there's direct evidence of Apple insiders thinking Siri was pretty great.

Of course we could assume Apple insiders realised Siri was an underwhelming product, even if there's no video evidence. Perhaps the product is evidence enough?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpGJNPShzRc