Recently, the company released their latest round of software updates, though notably absent was a significant update to Siri announced in 2024.
Mentioned briefly during the Keynote by Apple as requiring “more time to reach a high-quality bar”, I had a conversation with the company’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Greg “Joz” Joswiak, to explore the company’s stance on artificial intelligence and the oversight concerning the missing Personal Context features in Siri.
Discussing AI, Joswiak states it must function seamlessly like any Apple feature, explaining to 9News exclusively: “Our approach is to incorporate generative AI to enhance features across our apps, operating systems, and products to improve those offerings.”
“Sometimes you don’t even know or care that you’re using generative AI, that you’re using Apple Intelligence to do those things. They just – and you know us – it just works.”
But 12 months ago, the company promised a new and innovative experience with the voice assistant Siri, one that could know more about you and your life.
“One of the things that we wanted to do for it (Siri), that we talked about last year, was to make it a more personal context,” Joswiak says.
“That it was able to use a semantic index of all the information about you on your device.
“So, for example, when’s my mum’s flight coming in?
“It knows who your mum is in that context. It knows that flight information, no matter where it came in, was that information on text or an email?”
It didn’t happen – the feature hasn’t launched yet.
Joswiak says “we said these things would be coming in the coming months, and that we thought we’d ship by later in the year”.
“It just wasn’t quite hitting our quality standards,” he says.
“So we said, okay, maybe we should do it by the spring. And it still again, was working, but too many times it was not working correctly.
“So while a demonstration on stage was possible, the concept of taking all the information on your phone and using that to help Siri make decisions based on questions you asked just wasn’t working in the real world.”
This brought the development teams to a decision point.
“So we had to make a decision and say, look, do we want to ship it to our customers and say, okay, look, we did it. We promised you it would, but it’s again, it’s not perfect,” Joswiak says.
“Or do we want to wait until we can do it better? And we knew we were working on another version of Siri, a new generation of Siri, that would allow us the underpinnings to do it better, to do it with a much lower error rate.
“So we had to make what I would say is a tough call to hold it off.”
Despite fierce criticism in recent months of this failure to deliver, Joswiak says he “would make that call again”.
“To say that we want to deliver a better experience, not just a checkbox that we shipped it, but shipped an experience that hit our level of quality,” he says.
“And so, while we never want to disappoint people, I think we disappoint them more if we ship something that didn’t work.”
Clearly though, Apple knows they are getting more attention on this than perhaps might be deserved, with Joswiak pointing the finger, albeit vaguely, at other companies who don’t receive the same scrutiny.
“We want our customers to have great experiences with our product,” he says.
“And we’ve made mistakes where we ship something that we wish was more perfect than it was.
“And in the end, you learn from those and you say, look, we have a quality bar, we want to make sure that we hit it.
“Oftentimes you see our competitors will announce things, not ship them. And sometimes people who don’t even notice.”
For Joswiak and Apple, this is about quality and the experience.
“People are so used to us delivering what we say or delivering at a quality level, expectations are different from that,” he says.
“And we welcome that. That’s who we are. We love that our customers have high expectations for us. And like I said, we never want to disappoint them, but we also want to make sure that we deliver quality products to them.”
With all that said, it appears unlikely we’ll see any dramatic improvement to Siri in 2025; these fundamental updates and personal context features are likely to come in 2026, hopefully well before the company’s next Worldwide Developers Conference.
Trevor Long travelled to the US as a guest of Apple.
