Within a report published by The Information, former Apple employees have shared behind the scenes information on the development of Siri, Apple’s voice-activated personal assistant part of iOS, watchOS, macOS, and tvOS.
The insightful claims originating from within Cupertino share how early builds of Siri were reportedlY Rushed to be included as part of the iPhone 4s before it was fully ready to launch, causing a “major problem” for the teams developing the software.
At the time, Apple’s software development chief Scott Forstall appointed Richard Williamson, who was managing the Apple Maps project, to head up the Siri team. The employees speaking out within todays report claim Williamson made a number of decisions that the rest of the Siri team disagreed with, including a plan to only improve Siri’s capabilities once a year, rather than within regular iOS software updates.
Siri’s various teams morphed into an unwieldy apparatus that engaged in petty turf battles and heated arguments over what an ideal version of Siri should be—a quick and accurate information fetcher or a conversant and intuitive assistant capable of complex tasks.
The report shares how Apple apparently considered leaving Siri out of HomePod, with the development team only learning of Apple’s plans to release a smart-speaker in 2015 after Amazon unveiled the Echo in late 2014.
Siri on the iPhone 4s | Via Apple.
The Information says that Siri is the main reason the HomePod has “underperformed,” and said Siri’s capabilities “remain limited compared to the competition”.
In a sign of how unprepared Apple was to deal with a rivalry, two Siri team members told The Information that their team didn’t even learn about Apple’s HomePod project until 2015—after Amazon unveiled the Echo in late 2014. One of Apple’s original plans was to launch its speaker without Siri included, according to a source.
Apple has responded to the claims within the report noting how Siri is “the world’s most popular voice assistant”…
We have made significant advances in Siri performance, scalability and reliability and have applied the latest machine learning techniques to create a more natural voice and more proactive features,” Apple wrote in its statement. “We continue to invest deeply in machine learning and artificial intelligence to continually improve the quality of answers Siri provides and the breadth of questions Siri can respond to.