April 23 (Bloomberg) -- Bloomberg published a blog post today (April 23) reporting thatapplenewly-appointed Siri Mike Rockwell, Engineering Leader is overhauling the development management team for voice assistant Siri.
According to people familiar with the matter, Rockwell is replacing Siri's leadership with a number of key players from the Vision Pro software team. Among them is Ranjit Desai, who is responsible for Siri's core engineering, including the underlying platform and systems group, and is a veteran Rockwell associate who has excelled in Vision Pro development.
Rockwell emphasized to employees that Desai's experience with "high-performance, low-latency systems" would significantly improve Siri's performance.
In addition, Olivier Gutknecht takes over the user experience team, while Nate Begeman and Tom Duffy work on the underlying architecture, aiming to build "world-class and scalable" technology.
Technological backwardness triggers high-level attention, reform is imperative
Note: Siri has been Apple's signature voice assistant since its launch in 2011, but its technology has fallen significantly behind Alphabet Inc.'s Google and OpenAI Siri's woes also reflect Apple's struggle to find a foothold in the fast-growing AI space.
Recent project delays and engineering issues have forced CEO Tim Cook to seek new leadership, and Rockwell took over Siri engineering last month, stripping some of the responsibilities from AI lead John Giannandrea and former Siri lead Robby Walker.
The reorganization also involved key areas such as data, training and voice components, where Rockwell adjusted or downgraded previous management.
Upgrading the technical architecture, the future is promising but challenging
Apple is working on the technical architecture of Siri. Currently, Siri has a "dual-brain" system: one that handles traditional commands, such as setting a timer, and another based on a large language model (LLM) for more complex tasks. However, it is difficult for both to operate efficiently at the same time, leading to quality issues.
Apple plans to unify the architecture into a single LLM system for a more natural conversational interface, but this upgrade is expected to take years. Meanwhile, the launch of a new feature, App Intents, has been delayed indefinitely due to quality issues.
Apple is working with third-party developers to ensure the feature is seamlessly integrated and plans to let Siri perform complex tasks like finding, editing and sending photos with a single voice command.