Apple struggles with inner turmoil, turf wars over Siri: Report

CEO Tim Cook and other executives within the company have requested Siri's responses be written by a team of 20 writers, instead of them being AI-generated (Representative Image)

Apple's reluctance to loosen its stance on user privacy and organisational issues have led to Siri being, "widely derided" within the company.

As reported by MacRumors, a new report from the publication, The Information, sheds light on what seems to have gone wrong with Apple's Siri voice assistant and the company's Artificial Intelligence (AI) efforts.

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The article cites over three dozen former employees of the company who say that by 2018, the Siri team had "devolved into a mess, driven by petty turf battles between senior leaders and heated arguments over the direction of the assistant."

Apple's strict stance on privacy meant they did not invest in building analytical tools for Siri, which meant the engineers were often working without any usage metrics for the voice assistant.

They also called the data collected from the data science and engineering team within the company useless, saying it was "a waste of time and money."

Many employees supposedly left the company to work with competitors like Google or OpenAI because they believed Apple was too conservative in its approach with Large Language Models (LLM) and AI.

Apple executives have even turned down feature proposals such as giving Siri the ability to conduct in-depth conversations, claiming the feature would be difficult to control.

Apple's strict adherence to privacy has also posed challenges for the team, with the company insisting that most of the assistant's functions be calculated on-device.

CEO Tim Cook and other executives within the company have requested the assistant's responses be written by a team of 20 writers, instead of them being AI-generated.

In 2019, an overhaul project for Siri codenamed 'Blackbird' was kicked off, and the assistant was rebuilt from scratch to be more lightweight and most of its core functions would run on-device instead of uploading data to the cloud.

Early demos of the project seemed to have impressed the Apple employees, but unfortunately Blackbird was competing with another project called 'Siri X' which eventually won out.

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Siri X was a scaled-down project which simply aimed to move all of the assistants functions to be processed on-device, but without the enhanced functionality of Blackbird.

Even Apple's mixed-reality headset team, which is going through own set of problems, has been unhappy with Siri. The headset team considered building an alternate method for voice control because it deemed Siri, "unsatisfactory".