Siri ‘widely derided’ at Apple and Reality Pro team wanted it replaced – report

The Apple employees behind the forthcoming Reality Pro headset were so disillusioned with the Siri voice assistant they wanted to built their own alternative.

That’s according to former employees speaking to The Information about the personal voice assistant that pre-dates rivals, but has been left behind by stymied innovation down the years.

According to the report (via 9to5Mac), which is based on interviews with over three dozen former employees of Apple’s AI and machine learning groups, Siri “remains widely derided” internally.

The report says:

Inside Apple, Siri remains widely derided for its lack of functionality and improvements since [former Google executive John] Giannandrea took over, say multiple former Siri employees. For example, the team building Apple’s mixed-reality headset, including its leader Mike Rockwell, has expressed disappointment in the demonstrations the Siri team created to showcase how the voice assistant could control the headset, according to two people familiar with the matter. At one point, Rockwell’s team considered building alternative methods for controlling the device using voice commands, the people said (the headset team ultimately ditched that idea).

The Information

Some of Apple’s issues in upgrading Siri have been caused by losing top engineers to Google. The Information report says Srinivasan Venkatachary, Steven Baker, and Anand Shukla all upped sticks.

It’s not the first time we’ve seen a report focusing on Siri’s inadequacies recently. Last month a New York Times piece claimed Siri’s back-end architecture was preventing it catching up with AI-based rivals like Open AI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.

Part of Apple’s issues with shifting its existing Siri model to a more interactive solution is down to the way the assistant’s word database was originally compiled, which a source described as “one big snowball”. That meant there was no “clear path” to pivot Siri to a ChatGPT like tool.

Apple will almost certainly be working on a conversational model similar to ChatGPT. The company’s ambitions in the search realm are well documented and it appears this is the general direction search is heading.