Is Apple Finally Getting Serious about Siri?

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There’s no point in mincing words here: Siri is broken. It’s not just that the voice assistant hasn’t seen any significant improvements in the nearly 14 years since it debuted on the iPhone 4S; if anything, it’s getting worse.
When Apple debuted Apple Intelligence last June, it brought new hope that the company would finally do something to improve Siri. Certainly, the dog-and-pony show at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) was impressive. However, software demos are easy, results are hard.
Instead, what we’ve seen since ChatGPT came to the table is a Siri that’s actually dumber than ever. Old Siri readily admitted its ignorance, handing out a set of search results for anything it couldn’t answer. New Siri, seemingly emboldened by its new ChatGPT buddy, comes up with answers that are stupefyingly wrong to even the most basic knowledge questions, like “Who won the Super Bowl?”
It’s downright embarrassing for the voice assistant that led the way into the modern era. As difficult as it may be to believe, Siri arrived three years before Amazon Alexa and five years before Google Assistant. However, both of those have been eating its lunch, and last year, Google took things to a whole new level, replacing Google Assistant with Gemini Live — a feature-rich and capable voice assistant based on its Gemini AI platform. This week, Samsung followed suit with its Galaxy S25 lineup, showing Bixby the door in favor of Gemini Live.
Apple would have been better off deepening its partnership with OpenAI, giving Siri its walking papers, and embracing ChatGPT as its main voice assistant. Instead, Apple has created a Frankensteinian hybrid that is somehow less than the sum of its parts.
On its own, ChatGPT is brilliant. By itself, Siri is dumb, but it knows it. However, putting the two together has resulted in a digital version of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
To be fair, Siri’s transmogrification into the Apple Intelligence world has yet to fully occur. The next big step is expected in iOS 18.4, but that may be optimistic. Some reports suggest Apple won’t get there until an iOS 19 point release in early 2026 — likely iOS 19.4.
Apple Brings in the Big Guns
Apple has to know that Siri is failing to meet expectations. When one of Apple’s most loyal fans, John Gruber, pens a scathing article titled Siri Is Super Dumb and Getting Dumber, somebody in the C-suite should be sitting up and taking notice.
Gruber may be an Apple fan, but like most true fans, he’s also the company’s most prominent critic. We all really want Apple to do better, and that won’t happen if we give it a pass on its dumpster fires.
Apple execs can’t be so oblivious that they don’t already realize they have a problem, so it’s unlikely this is coming due to Gruber’s recent article, but the company is reportedly making some essential shifts in its upper echelons to “fix” Siri.
This morning, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that Apple has reassigned one of its most highly regarded troubleshooters to the task of “whipping artificial intelligence and Siri into shape.”
The “fixer” is Kim Vorrath, a vice president and Apple veteran of nearly four decades who has a history of righting toppling ships inside the company. Sources speaking to Gurman say she’s been moved to the artificial intelligence and machine learning division, where she’ll report directly to AI chief John Giannandrea.
Vorrath, who has spent 36 years at Apple, is known for managing the development of tough software projects. She’s also put procedures in place that can catch and fix bugs. Vorrath joins the new team from Apple’s hardware engineering division, where she helped launch the Vision Pro headset.
Mark Gurman
While Vorrath isn’t a name most of us have heard, she’s been a driving force behind the scenes in keeping many of the company’s most prominent projects on track. She was the lead project manager for the original iPhone, and until 2019, she oversaw project management for Apple’s flagship lineup of operating systems — iOS, iPadOS, and macOS — and later added visionOS to the mix.
Dare we hope that Vorrath’s presence will make a difference? At this point, it’s hard to be optimistic, but what choice do we have? When Giannandrea joined Apple in early 2018, he seemed ready to breathe new life into a Siri team that had been benched for the better part of a decade.
Siri began as a passion project for Apple’s late CEO, Steve Jobs, and software chief Scott Forstall, who acquired the eponymous company in 2010. However, after Jobs’ untimely death and Forestall’s forced departure, Siri was reassigned to SVP Eddy Cue, who was busy courting Beats and preparing to launch Apple Music. Siri languished in Apple’s Services division for eight years until Apple hired Giannandrea from Google and created a new Machine Learning and AI Strategy division. In early 2019, Giannandrea restructured the Siri team to play the long game and focus on major improvements that would take more time to develop.
However, there’s more to Apple’s Machine Learning and AI Strategy than just Siri and Apple Intelligence. In late 2020, Apple moved the Apple Car project into its AI division, suggesting it had changed direction to focus on self-driving software. The whole project was ultimately scrapped early last year, but not before Giannandrea’s team invested countless person-hours into it.
If anything, the death of the Apple Car should signal a renewed focus on core AI and, hopefully, Siri. However, what remains is still an ambitious undertaking. Gurman notes that it’s “been clear for some time now that Giannandrea needs additional help managing an AI group with growing prominence.”
That’s where Vorrath comes in. Gurman’s sources leaked the details in a memo from Giannandrea to his staff, in which the AI boss emphasizes that the group will be “focused on revamping the underlying infrastructure of Siri and improving the company’s in-house AI models.”
Apple is still starting from behind, and Gurman notes that even if Apple accomplishes everything it has planned for Siri in iOS 18.4, it won’t come close to what Samsung and Google Gemini can do now.
The scuttlebutt within Apple is that Giannandrea doesn’t have what it takes to “turn Apple into a force in AI,” and that’s likely why Vorrath has been brought to the team. The experienced project manager is expected to “impose more discipline on the effort.” According to the Apple executive Gurman spoke with, “Vorrath has a knack for organizing engineering groups and creating an effective workflow with new processes,” and “brought sanity and reason” to the Vision Pro software development team. Here’s hoping she can do the same for the Siri team.