“She was supposed to be so pretty, American, intelligent. Too bad” – this is how, paraphrasing the classic quote from the comedy “Sami swoi”, one can sum up Apple's latest efforts to individualize the assistant's responses, using the data stored on users' iPhones.
In June last year, Apple announced that it would release a “rejuvenated” version of Siri. It was supposed to have access to emails, text messages and the Internet in real time, so that it could answer questions such as: When does my mother's plane land?, comparing, for example, flight radar with messages from a parent regarding a selected travel time.
The company, considered a pioneer and the one that defined the era of mobile devices in 2007 with the iPhone, is slowly losing its lead. Apple has announced another delay, which has only fueled rumors that big tech is running out of breath in the race to AI. The management reportedly called the latest change to the term “ugly and embarrassing,” as quoted by CNN News. However, as experts point out, the company's large user base and ubiquity of its devices still give it an advantage over its competitors, who are releasing newer and newer AI models.
This is not Apple's only problem. Like all US technology companies, it must face the threat of tariffs on imports from China, where key links in its supply chain are located. At the same time, the company recorded an 11% year-on-year drop in sales in the Middle Kingdom. Global iPhone sales, a factor driving the company's market capitalization of over $3 trillion, also fell short of Apple's expectations.
Apple Intelligence seems to be lagging behind Google and Samsung, introducing AI into its models much later than the competition. Siri was supposed to take over some of the tasks – it could search through text messages for a cake recipe that a friend sent a few months ago, freeing the user from scrolling through a list of messages, or add personalized emoticons to photos and send them to selected users without having to click through several applications. The competition has not yet achieved this, although it is close, because Google has made it possible to customize Gemini's response based on search history, and Amazon's Alexa+ is supposed to remember the user's preferences, such as favorite restaurants or songs.
As Bloomberg reported, the Siri update was supposed to enter users' lives in April of this year. However, this will not happen. – Delivering these features will take a little longer than initially planned – wrote Apple “ambassador” Daring Fireball on the blog.
– Apple should be playing first fiddle in this race – said Den Bajarin, CEO and chief analyst of research firm Creative Strategies. – The fact that they have little to show, despite the efforts put into this process, is disturbing – he added on CNN News.
Such a delay is rare for the company. “I don’t remember Apple doing anything like this before,” said Gene Munster, managing partner of Deepwater Asset Management and a former industry analyst who has followed Apple for decades. “It doesn’t mean their philosophy has changed, but I think it’s a sign of how hard they’re trying,” he said. Such delays may stem from concerns about the consequences that Google, among others, faced last year when its AI Overviews feature, which provides artificial intelligence-generated summaries of Google search results, recommended, among other things, putting glue on a pizza to prevent the cheese from falling off and the stone from being eaten.
