In March, Apple postponed the release of its enhanced Siri, stating, “it’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver” the planned features. At this week’s WWDC, Apple’s SVP of software Craig Federighi and SVP of worldwide marketing Greg Joswiak offered more insights regarding the delay during an interview with The Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern.
During the initial Apple Intelligence announcements at WWDC 2024, Apple revealed that the upgraded Siri would be aware of personal context and capable of performing tasks within apps. Despite showcasing actual software at that event, Federighi mentioned that Siri “didn’t converge in the way, quality-wise, that we needed it to.” Apple prioritized making it “really, really reliable. And we weren’t able to achieve the reliability in the time we thought.”
Joswiak remarked, “Look, we don’t want to disappoint customers,” explaining, “We never do. But it would’ve been more disappointing to ship something that didn’t hit our quality standard, that had an error rate that we felt was unacceptable. So we made what we thought was the best decision. I’d make it again.”
Stern asked why Apple, with all of its resources, couldn’t make it work. “When it comes to automating capabilities on devices in a reliable way, no one’s doing it really well right now,” Federighi said. “We wanted to be the first. We wanted to do it best.” While the company had “very promising early results and working initial versions,” the team came to feel that “this just doesn’t work reliably enough to be an Apple product,” he said.
