(Bloomberg) -- Apple Inc.’s top executive overseeing its Siri virtual assistant told staff that delays to key features have been ugly and embarrassing, and a decision to publicly promote the technology before it was ready made matters worse.
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Robby Walker, who serves as a senior director at Apple, delivered the stark comments during an all-hands meeting for the Siri division, saying that the team was facing a bad period. Walker also said that it’s unclear when the enhancements will actually launch, according to people with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be identified because the gathering was private.
The frank discussion shows the extent of Apple’s crisis in the field of artificial intelligence, where it’s struggling to catch up with peers. Siri — less advanced than rival systems — has become a symbol of Apple’s AI challenges. And the company’s woes boiled over last week, when it acknowledged publicly that critical features would be delayed indefinitely.
During the all-hands gathering, Walker suggested that employees on his team may be feeling angry, disappointed, burned out and embarrassed after the features were postponed. The company had been racing to get the technology ready for this spring, but now the features aren’t expected until next year at the earliest, people familiar with the matter have said.
Still, he praised the team for developing “incredibly impressive” features and vowed to deliver an industry-leading virtual assistant to consumers.
Apple shares had fallen 16% this year through Thursday’s close, part of a broader stock rout that has walloped tech companies. The stock rebounded Friday, but pared gains during the afternoon. Apple was up 1.4% at $212.58 as of 2:18 p.m. in New York.
On Feb. 14, Bloomberg News reported that Apple was struggling with bugs and engineering problems on its planned artificial intelligence tools for Siri. At the time, the company postponed the release from April to May, aiming to include the features in its iOS 18.5 operating system. Now it’s looking to add them as an update as early as the iOS 19 software cycle next year.
A spokesperson for Cupertino, California-based Apple declined to comment on the meeting, which was put on the schedule last week.
The features — unveiled last June at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference — are fundamental to making Siri a more effective personal assistant. The technology will allow the software to tap into users’ personal data to better respond to queries. Siri, which was first introduced in 2011, also will be able to more precisely control apps and analyze content that’s on a user’s screen.
But when Apple demonstrated the features at WWDC using a video mock-up, it only had a barely working prototype, Bloomberg has reported. Walker told staff in the meeting that the delays were especially “ugly” because Apple had already showed off the features publicly. “This was not one of these situations where we get to show people our plan after it’s done,” he said. “We showed people before.”
“To make matters worse,” Walker said, Apple’s marketing communications department wanted to promote the enhancements. Despite not being ready, the capabilities were included in a series of marketing campaigns and TV commercials starting last year.
Apple touted the features as a key selling point of the iPhone 16 line, which otherwise lacked major changes. And it’s part of a broader AI push called Apple Intelligence.
Walker also raised doubts about even meeting the current release expectations. Though Apple is aiming for iOS 19, it “doesn’t mean that we’re shipping then,” Walker said. The company has several more priorities in development, and trade-offs will need to be made, he said.
“We have other commitments across Apple to other projects,” Walker said, citing new software and hardware initiatives. “We want to keep our commitments to those, and we understand those are now potentially more timeline-urgent than the features that have been deferred.” He said decisions on timing will be made on a “case-by-case basis” as work progresses on products planned for next year.
“Customers are not expecting only these new features but they also want a more fully rounded-out Siri,” he said. “We’re going to ship these features and more as soon as they are ready.”
Walker said that there is “intense personal accountability” about this effort shared by his boss John Giannandrea, the head of AI at Apple, as well as software chief Craig Federighi and other executives.
As of Friday, Apple doesn’t plan to immediately fire any top executives over the AI crisis, according to people with knowledge of the matter. That decision could theoretically change at any time. In any case, the company is poised to make management adjustments. It has discussed moving more senior executives under Giannandrea to assist with a turnaround effort. Already, the company tapped longtime executive Kim Vorrath — seen as a project fixer — to assist the group.
Walker said the decision to delay the features was made because of quality issues and that the company has found the technology only works properly up to two-thirds to 80% of the time — which is to say it doesn’t work every one out of three times. He said the group “can make more progress to get those percentages up, so that users get something they can really count on.”
In recent weeks, Federighi voiced concerns to other senior executives that the features weren’t working as advertised, ultimately prompting the decision to delay, Bloomberg reported. Issues with Apple Intelligence were clear from the start, with the company postponing the first batch of features last year and providing vague timelines during its launch event.
Walker defended his Siri group, telling them that they should be proud. Employees poured their “hearts and souls into this thing,” he said. “I saw so many people giving everything they had in order to make this happen and to make incredible progress together.”
But Apple wants to maintain a high bar and only deliver the features when they’re polished, he said. “These are not quite ready to go to the general public, even though our competitors might have launched them in this state or worse.”
Walker compared the endeavor to an attempt to swim to Hawaii. “We swam hundreds of miles — we set a Guinness Book for World Records for swimming distance — but we still didn’t swim to Hawaii,” he said. “And we were being jumped on, not for the amazing swimming that we did, but the fact that we didn’t get to the destination.”
He showed examples during the meeting of the technology working: It was able to locate his driver’s license number on command and find specific photos of a child. He also demonstrated how the technology could precisely manipulate apps via voice control. It embedded content in an email, added recipients and made other changes.
Walker told staff that they should “feel really proud of innovative work” done to develop the personal search feature, despite saying it doesn’t always work sufficiently.
Still, the company has met other goals for Siri. That includes bringing a Type-to-Siri interface to iOS 18, as well as adding Apple product knowledge to the platform and an improved understanding of customers. It’s planning to offer Apple Intelligence in several new languages next month and is working overtime to enable the features for China as part of partnerships with Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Baidu Inc.
Walker said that some staffers may feel “relieved” over the delays. “If you were using these features in the build, you were probably wondering: Are these ready? How do I feel about shipping these to our customers? Is this the right choice?”
He added that some employees “might be feeling embarrassed.”
“You might have co-workers or friends or family asking you what happened, and it doesn’t feel good,” Walker said. “It’s very reasonable to feel all these things.” He said others are feeling burnout and that his team will be entitled to time away to recharge to get ready for “plenty of hard work ahead.”
The executive said he didn’t want things to get worse before they got better, saying that special attention will need to be paid to the integration of existing features into iOS 19.
Walker ended the meeting upbeat, saying that Apple will “ship the world’s greatest virtual assistant.”
But there’s still a long road ahead. The delayed Siri features are just the first step toward modernizing the software. Apple has been planning upgrades for 2027 that will make Siri more conversational, letting it better compete with other AI chatbots, Bloomberg has reported.
This will require a new infrastructure. “There’s much we will be keeping and there are meaningful things we will be changing,” Walker said.
The team has “learned a lot together,” he said. “We’ll make the adjustments that we need to have a better outcome going forward.”
(Updates shares in sixth paragraph and adds more on Siri’s history in ninth paragraph.)
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