I remember when I was a kid having an old iPod touch that didn’t support Siri and having to jailbreak it, find some weird poorly documented package in Cydia, and download that suspect package on my device while entering some (in hindsight) equally suspect servers into some really hard to find text field in settings that somehow™ enabled that old iPod touch use Siri.

All of that to realize Siri was kind of boring. Funny thing is it’s been over a decade and it’s maybe 20% better than it was at launch. MAYBE.

I don’t want to blame this one guy for all of that, but part of me can’t help but point at the leader and ask “you couldn’t have done better than… that?”

I'm really surprised this got any fanfare at all from Apple. Kind of confirms a single person as the reason for their continual AI misses which feels weird for them.

Nah, ksec had a great post in a thread a few months ago about a number of senior execs Tim Cook has promoted to positions to which they're ill-suited. John Giannandrea was just one of many such people:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43436174

An organization of Apple's size doesn't fail due to the mistakes of a single person, unless that person is the CEO.

Who? Maybe that was the problem.

What did he even do for Apple's AI strategy for 7 years?

Apple is still far behind in doing anything useful with AI.

He did nothing, or net-negative. Same as Google; it was totally unclear how this guy got promoted to the level of power he had based on his history.

[Now I remember- he came in with the metaweb acquisition at a time when search was going all-in on knowledge graphs and semantics]

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46114144

interesting

No one dares to question Apple’s culture. Perhaps something is rotten inside. The same people who milked iPhone for 14 years. But they got Vision Pro a full year after Meta proved that’s a dead end. What a joke of corporate leadership.

The Vision Pro release is a complete joke. If Meta can't make it work for under 1K it's definitely not going to work if you only offer a slighter better product for 3,5K.

I believe that they are so arrogant that they think Meta just suck when in fact it is just a product category still looking for a valuable use case to the general public.

They market it for watching movies but most peoples already hate using headphones for too long and those are pretty comfortable nowadays.

Even if you have all the money in the world, it's still crucial to put the right people in the right places.

Underlying this seems to be a hard engineering problem: how to run a SaaS within UI timeframes that can store or ferry enough context to tailor for individual users, with privacy.

While Eddie Cue seems to be Apple's SaaS man, I can't say I'm confident that separating AI development and implementation is a good idea, or that Apple's implementation will not fall outside UI timeframes, given their other availability issues.

Unstated really is how good local models will be as an alternative to SaaS. That's been the gambit, and perhaps the prospective hardware-engineering CEO signals some breakthrough in the pipeline.

Why does the title of this post keep changing? I think this is at least the third iteration of it now. I don't understand the HN obsession with titles. Now half the comments don't even make sense or people wonder why they keep talking about Siri.

Wow, come to think of it, Siri failed; ChatGPT completely eclipsed the tool.

I know one feature Siri has added in the past fifteen years, because I always complained that Siri couldn't "text this photo to my wife." I would demonstrate to people that this doesn't work, complain about the lack of discoverability, and mention how with each new release of iOS I would try it again to confirm it still didn't work.

Then one time, in a job interview of all things, (I'm a PM and was asked for an example of a product I liked or didn't like) I went into this spiel, and what do you know, Siri texted the photo to my wife. :-)

So somewhere along the way they did add that feature, and apparently I didn't realize I had missed checking for it.

Siri will sometimes describe a photo sent to me whilst driving, and be surprisingly accurate - "a child holding a can of soup"

And then half the time it's "a screenshot of a social media post" - c'mon, read the damn text from the screenshot at least!

They definitely do change things and not always for the better. I used to start running/walking workouts from the Apple Watch telling Siri something along the lines of "let's get running!" or "let's go for a walk" to which it would react starting the right kind of workout. Since WatchOS 26 it tells me it doesn't know where I am and something about privacy settings, and that's it. Asking in robot mode it does work though: "start running workout"

I just want whoever is next in line to make Siri perform reliably and consistently. Not 70% of the time of even 90% of the time, 100% of the time for the limited uses cases that most (perhaps just me?) people use it for:

- Call "person"

- Call "business" (please don't say "I don't see so and so in your contacts" and on a second try, work)

- Find "place" (while driving) - Define "phrase or word" (please don't say I found this on the web)

- Set a timer or alarm

- Check the messages (in a sane way)

- Set reminders (this one surprisingly works well)

- Use intents correctly (I just want to be able to say "play 99% invisible in Overcast")

It doesn't need to do all the fancy things they show-cased last year. It just needs to do the basics really well and build from there.

“Calling Noh Replee…”

What a ducking surprise

So the new VP for AI comes from Microsoft, after having only been there for a couple months? I'd be a little bit concerned about that, someone jumping ship so quickly.

Also, Apple tends to recruit internally first for VP positions, which they didn't do in this case. I am sure they considered internal candidates though, but I feel they're getting a bit "desperate" in the AI game to show progress.

I worked with JG. He was a good guy. Got no idea what happened at Apple, but I have nothing but good feelings from when I knew him 25 years ago.

Any other Indians/Hindi-speakers here think that "giannandrea" has an uncanny association with "gyanendra"?

Siri is doomed by Apple global strategy. Even if they really make it to work, it would work only in a few selected languages which is a parody of AI these days. They are living in 90s when only a few languages were important

As of now, 333 Comments so far and all of them are either on Siri or AI problems.

I thought there is a much deeper problem, this is yet another Tim Cook hiring that didn't work. In fact I am not aware of a single SVP grade report to Tim Cook that came from outside of Apple were successful.

Seven years leading AI at Apple, and Siri never meaningfully improved for most users. Leadership changes alone won’t fix that, but maybe this is finally Apple acknowledging that its voice/AI strategy needs a reset.

The new guy they brought in has already jumped ship twice in the last 6 months, 16y at Google, then to Microsoft in 06/25 and now to Apple.

Was the MS gig so bad?

"Hey Siri, stop playback"

...

...

...

Siri disappears and song continues playing

...

"Hey Siri, stop playback"

Songs stops playing.