- Apple’s progress with Siri and artificial intelligence has been slow, and features promised in June remain delayed.
- At a Siri team meeting, senior director Robby Walker acknowledged the frustration within the team, describing the delays as “ugly.”
- Features like Siri understanding personal context and taking action based on a user’s screen are still not ready and may not make it into iOS 19.
- Challenges include quality issues that caused these features to malfunction up to a third of the time and conflicts with Apple’s marketing division over showcasing incomplete features.
- Apple has withdrawn related advertisements and added disclaimers on its website, citing extended development times.
- Senior executives, including Craig Federighi and John Giannandrea, are reportedly taking personal accountability for the delays.
- Walker emphasized that the team’s work is impressive and that the delayed features will be released once they meet Apple’s standards.
I’ve never used Apple intelligence and Siri alone has done a fine job for unit conversions, info lookups, and most any other things. No need to fire up chat GPT for those basic uses
Mm. Siri doesn’t do information lookups in the sense that I mean. It resorts to “here’s something I found on the web” very very quickly, and that’s not very helpful.
Fair enough. It’s not going to summarize results or anything. I’ll give chatGPT that one. But this is also where chatGPT can easily pull wrong information into the summary. If the “here’s something I found on the web” isn’t accurate, the topic is likely to have the AI summary screw it up too. In which case you’re better off manually searching and filtering results yourself.
Hallucination exists but is massively exaggerated in popular discourse about AI. The worst examples of all time are paraded and amplified, meanwhile people use these tools successfully every day. I’ve spot checked results and not ever really gone wrong. I do prefer the tools that provide links to their sources though.