Thought Leadership
For the first time, Apple has explained in more detail why a new version of the voice assistant Siri with artificial intelligence has been delayed.
The iPhone company did have working prototypes of the software. “But we couldn’t make them reliable as quickly as we thought,” Apple’s software boss Craig Federighi told the Wall Street Journal on the fringes of the company’s own developer conference WWDC.
The iPhone company announced a greatly improved Siri with artificial intelligence at WWDC 2024. Apple’s plan is for the future Siri to be particularly helpful for users because the software has access to users’ personal information and can be active across various apps. Very specific usage scenarios were already presented a year ago. However, in March, Apple announced that it would take longer for this to be implemented – estimated to be “next year”.
No exact new date
“I would make this decision again,” Marketing Director Greg Jozwiak told the newspaper. He contradicted the claim that Apple did not even have a functioning AI Siri a year ago.
Federighi explained that internal use had shown that the software did not function reliably enough to be an Apple product if it left “well-trodden paths”. When asked, he did not want to give a specific new date for the release of the AI Siri – because they wanted to have the problems under control first.
Core of “Apple Intelligence”
Rival Google, which develops the competing Android mobile operating system, is currently in the process of integrating its Gemini AI software into smartphones. It could play a similar role to the one Apple has in mind for Siri on iPhones. AI systems such as Gemini or ChatGPT from developer OpenAI make original voice assistance software such as Siri, Google Assistant or Amazon’s Alexa look outdated.
Apple combined its AI offerings last year under the name “Apple Intelligence”. To date, the software has been able to reformulate and summarize texts and create new emoji from user descriptions, among other things. Last year, the company presented the new Siri as the heart of Apple.
dpa
