Apple Overpromised on AI Siri and Its Staff Is Not Happy About it

Last week, in a classic Friday news dump, Apple made the deeply embarrassing announcement that it would be delaying plans to infuse its voice assistant Siri with artificial intelligence-powered capabilities. But that announcement didn’t just send its stock price tumbling. According to a new report from Bloomberg, it’s also caused morale within its Siri team to spiral, too.

Per the inside account of Apple’s issues, Robby Walker, a senior director in Apple’s Siri division, held an all-hands meeting for the team and acknowledged that things were…not great. He acknowledged that team members might feel angry, embarrassed, and burned out by the whole situation. “You might have co-workers or friends or family asking you what happened, and it doesn’t feel good,” he reportedly said, according to Bloomberg.

What also doesn’t feel good is the apparent fact that Apple’s marketing kinda left the Siri folks hanging out to dry. They started running ads promoting the features that would be available in the suped-up Siri last year, promising that it’d arrive by June of this year. Those features were supposed to be part of the broader suite of Apple Intelligence offerings—one of the primary selling points of the iPhone 16, which otherwise didn’t offer a whole lot of upgrades. But now those aren’t coming.

In fact, it seems there’s no clear timeline for when they actually will arrive. Walker reportedly told the team that while Apple would like for their new intelligence features to roll out along with the launch of iOS 19, expected to be available this summer, it “doesn’t mean that we’re shipping then.” Currently, Bloomberg reports that the in-progress Siri feature only works the way it’s supposed to between two-thirds to 80% of the time—which both sounds woefully insufficient and, if you have any experience with Siri, is about in line with how well it already works.

While missing a deadline is painful and embarrassing, maybe the Siri team should take solace in the fact that most people probably aren’t missing those promised features all that much. A December 2024 survey from trade journal SellCell found that 73% of iPhone owners found the company’s new AI features to “add little to no value.”

That said, voice assistants like Siri kinda seem like a no-brainer application for artificial intelligence. It’s surprising that it’s taken so long for companies to get around to actually integrating it. Apple isn’t alone in this problem. It took until last month for Amazon to announce AI-powered features for its Alexa voice assistant, and even those are getting slow-rolled as the company introduces them to a limited selection of devices for the time being. For all the hype AI generates, it seems like finding ways to get consumers to use it is harder than it may seem.