Apple’s AI crisis point

On Friday, John Gruber of Daring Fireball received the following statement from Jacqueline Roy of Apple’s PR department:

“Siri helps our users find what they need and get things done quickly, and in just the past six months, we’ve made Siri more conversational, introduced new features like type to Siri and product knowledge, and added an integration with ChatGPT. We’ve also been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps. 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.” [Emphasis mine.]

Fairly or not, Apple was already perceived as being behind in AI nearly two years ago when iOS 17 came and went without a big AI announcement. Apple has long emphasized subsets of AI like machine learning in its products, but despite making a splashy hire in 2018 in bringing John Giannandrea over from Google, Siri in particular has not dramatically improved, and Apple has no AI chatbot to rival ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, and others, and that’s what regular users think of when they hear the term “AI.”

Last year’s unveiling of Apple Intelligence proved that Apple recognized the strategic importance of AI. Then and now, my view has been that Apple Intelligence represents a very Apple-centric take on AI. (And I mean that as a positive.) The features they’ve already shipped are weaved throughout Apple’s operating systems in a thoughtful way, and the privacy they’re guaranteeing to users is unparalleled. I don’t think any other company is even trying to do what Apple is with Private Cloud Compute.

Still, the killer feature announced for Apple Intelligence last year was context-aware Siri through enhanced system-wide app intents. That’s what Apple has failed to deliver in the timeframe it initially promised. That’s a black eye for Apple, and it explains the Friday news dump context of this announcement.

Still, I’m not feeling gloom-and-doom about this. Apple being behind is bad to be sure, but I still think there’s plenty of time to catch up. But what should Apple do in the near term?

• First, I’d like to see them expand third-party chatbot integration with Siri. Right now, only ChatGPT can be used to extend Siri’s capabilities, though Apple heavily hinted last year that additional chatbots might be available in the future. As a heavy Grok user, I’d love to see Grok integration, but let us also use Gemini, Claude, etc.

• Second, okay, you screwed up your timeline at delivering context-aware Siri. So regroup and get it out as soon as possible. Ideally, make it a day-one part of iOS 19. Further slippages would be a sign that Apple doesn’t have the right personnel in place.

• Third, is Giannandrea the guy? Without knowing everything he’s accomplished (since Apple doesn’t talk about the performance of individual senior vice presidents), it’s certainly easy to put the blame on him for the lack of meaningful Siri improvements since he arrived. Maybe it’s time to make a big change there.

• Fourth, what do we think about the Siri brand? It’s obviously super well-known, so I think it caries more brand value than a lot of people want to concede. But is it time to scrap it because there’s too much baggage associated with it? Maybe, but if you do that, you had better deliver right out the gate under the new name, or your new brand will be tainted right out of the gate.

All we can do for now is await Apple’s next big slate of operating system releases this summer at WWDC.

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