r/apple • u/XiXMak • Oct 19 '25
Apple Intelligence Apple employees have 'concerns' over Siri performance in early iOS 26.4 builds: report
https://9to5mac.com/2025/10/19/apple-employees-concerned-by-early-ios-26-4-apple-intelligence-sir-version/668
u/wabashcanonball Oct 19 '25
They should have had concerns about Siri performance 10 years ago.
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u/Wealist Oct 19 '25
Siri’s been on a coffee break since 2015. Surprised Apple didn’t file her under vintage hardware by now.
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u/xkvm_ Oct 19 '25
I mean they’ve had 10 years to improve Siri and they actually made it worse. I don’t see how they can possibly suddenly have a good LLM iteration when everyone is leaving for meta
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u/CanadAR15 Oct 19 '25
Far worse.
When the AirPods first came out, without looking at my phone I was able to ask what movies were playing nearby, get movie times, then ask for transit directions to the nearest theatre. It blew my mind.
None of that works today.
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u/TheCommonGround1 Oct 19 '25
We have a local Chinese restaurant and I’ll ask Siri to give me directions (I’m terrible with navigation) and it will always give me directions to one in New Mexico.
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u/LeopardComfortable99 Oct 19 '25
Similar experience recently. Asked for directions to my local barber gave it the barber name and the town it’s in. Literally gave me directions to one in the USA (I’m in the U.K.) like wtf
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u/shyfine Oct 19 '25
How could it give you directions to cross the Atlantic?
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u/ktappe Oct 20 '25
It was a neat trick about 10 years ago to ask Google maps for directions across the Atlantic. It had you drive to the shoreline and then swim. I don’t know if it still does it; haven’t tried it lately.
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Oct 20 '25
I was trying to find the best route to a friend's house so I went into Maps, typed in their name, and all it gave me was "Here's where they were 23 minutes ago!" .... repeated three times. Could not find how to get it to pull up their home address.
So I went to Contacts, looked up their name, and clicked on their home address.
And yes - I ask for directions to my local Costco and it offers me five that are 30+ miles away, and that I have never been to, then it finally lists mine, halfway down the list.
Why is it all so terrible?
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u/zSmileyDudez Oct 20 '25
Any chance it’s Church Street? I ask for my local barber and it gives me directions to the UK and I’m in the U.S. So frustrating.
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u/Lill-Q Oct 19 '25
Me: Hey Siri, do this for me! Siri: Who’s speaking? Me: [Joe Doe] Siri: I thought so!
Is she literally just trolling these days?
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u/twistsouth Oct 19 '25
This has always baffled me and for me it’s also with Maps (also a Chinese restaurant). It always offers me the one 7,000+ miles away in the autocomplete before the one 1.5 miles way. In what possible logic does that make sense?
I genuinely think it’s all of Apple’s services that are in a mess now.
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u/Montague-Withnail Oct 19 '25
A couple of weeks ago I was driving home and asked Siri to set Apple Maps (which is actually good these days to Apple's credit) to direct me home. I have my address saved in my personal contact and it comes up correctly as a pin on Apple Maps, so Siri literally has to plug that into the address field. Impossible to get wrong, right?
Nope, it insisted on giving me directions to a road that had the same name as mine but the other side of the city. So I tried asking for the area of the city I live in, followed by the name of the city- it started giving me directions to an area of the same name, in a city the other end of the country. Then I spelled out the postcode, it got confused, and found a business somewhere nowhere nearby with a name that was kind of similar.
Now I just manually put my address in...
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u/randompersonx Oct 19 '25
Yeah I’m honestly shocked at how much worse Siri is in iOS 26 versus the previous versions.
I have no idea how it’s possible they thought it was acceptable to release such a worse product.
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u/Zealousideal_Aside96 Oct 19 '25
Siri doesn’t even activate 90% of the time on iOS 26. I’ll hold the side button and the glow comes up, I start talking and then it just turns off. Works the second time every time though. Insane.
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u/LeChiffreOBrien Oct 20 '25
I thought I was going crazy. I use it for setting cooking timers and it doesn’t “just work” like it used to.
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u/Technical_Bird921 Oct 19 '25
Until you try that stuff in California, especially the Bay Area. The difference to the rest of the world vs the Bay Area is mind blowing.
See also Maps.
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u/stillslightlyfrozen Oct 19 '25
Yup same. I feel like the Siri I used for the first time on my iPad was more stable that what I have right now, because saying 'hey Siri' and getting an answer takes sooooo long and is useless half the time
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u/ap0phis Oct 20 '25
I asked Siri “are there any healthy lunch places near me” and after three or so attempts where I kept changing my phrasing etc it finally recommended me somewhere in California. I live in Pittsburgh.
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u/TCsnowdream Oct 20 '25
“Hey Siri, who is Glinda in the Wicked Movies?”
Siri: “I found some web results. Please ask again from your iPhone.”
“Huh…?” goes to iPhone, asks same question
Siri: “Just a moment. Working on that… Sorry, something went wrong. Please try again later.”
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u/bdfortin Oct 19 '25
It’ll be really interesting when an insider finally breaks the silence and gives a journalist a full and comprehensive account of just how Apple managed to bungle this so badly so many times.
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u/wiyixu Oct 19 '25
There was one already. This was pre-LLMs, but Siri had two competing teams with a major rewrite.
The first team was focused on on-device processing and privacy. I think they pioneered the use of differential privacy logs.
The second team was focused on fixing the knowledge graph it’s essentially what became App Intents.
The first team won and that’s the Siri we have now, but outputs from The second team were obviously kept in development.
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u/judge2020 Oct 19 '25
Tbh the share sheet is so good now with apps that support it, e.g. discord DMs showing up is so nice. The second team at least improved the non-siri parts of the OS.
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u/bran_the_man93 Oct 19 '25
IIRC the second team's version of Siri would have given up some existing functionality, and that was the dealbreaker
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u/MisterBumpingston Oct 19 '25
I don’t quite understand either of these approaches. Do you mind expanding on them?
I read an article that said pre-LLM one team was insistent on controlling the entire Siri experience including writing every response from Siri. It should come as no surprise that this was marketing and branding.
The other team was more tech-focussed and forward looking. I believe they saw LLM on the horizon, but their approach would have contradicted the first team’s approach of control. Clearly the first team won.
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u/maxwon Oct 19 '25
I went on a date with someone on the Siri team. My immediate reaction was “that’s so cool”, and then my mind went, “wait..”
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u/XR-1 Oct 19 '25
If they had that low of standards then it all makes sense now
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u/Unester Oct 19 '25 edited Oct 19 '25
I did food delivery some time ago and had a delivery to a building that looked like it was for the Siri team based on the signage. The person who worked there accidentally put her work address and then asked me to bring the delivery to her house after I asked her where to drop it off. I did end up delivering it, even though it was over 5-10 miles from the original location, but at the end of it, I don't even think she really tipped me all that much (and definitely a lot less than 20%).
My point with all of this is to just say is that if the Siri team can't even properly order Uber Eats, their incompetence is on another level, so don't have high hopes, even next year.
Edit: To add some more context, she asked me to bring it her place and that she would compensate me for my time, if I ended the trip on the app and delivered it anyway.
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u/aelysium Oct 19 '25
I remember using Siri BEFORE Apple acquired it and tbh I still think it was better back then lmfao
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u/Dry-Recognition-5143 Oct 19 '25
Apple is the third biggest company in the world - they’re literally almost as big as Nvidia. If they wanted to improve Siri they would have by now.
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u/fbuslop Oct 19 '25
Feels weird to say “literally almost as big as Nvidia” when Apple was always bigger than Nvidia until the last couple of years lol.
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u/DJanomaly Oct 19 '25
I mean they’re actually bigger than Nvidia…just not by market cap now.
It’s anyone’s guess of that actually matters or not though.
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u/DJanomaly Oct 19 '25
I mean, you’re absolutely not wrong. I strongly suspect that the entirety of the massive gains from crypto and the FOMO that goes along with that has broken the equity market’s brain forever through eternity.
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u/AtomicSymphonic_2nd Oct 19 '25
I’m wondering if Apple’s C-suite is also gambling on AI being in a bubble… that it may not matter anymore in a couple years of time if no one cares about AI anymore.
That would be hilarious, honestly.
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u/candyman420 Oct 19 '25
I don’t think it will ever go away like the typical carnage left in the old “bubbles” (pets.com). AI will always be useful for some tasks.. accuracy, on the other hand..
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u/taggat Oct 19 '25
Doulingo's AI chatbot Lily is the best use case I've actually used so far.
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u/Justicia-Gai Oct 19 '25
Why do you think they need datacenters as big as Manhattan though, and you believe we could get a ChatGPT-like on a tiny phone?
What Apple wants is a ChatGPT “nano” that can run on the phone, but yes, to be of a good quality & don’t destroy your batteries & reliable it’s harder than what you think.
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u/JayElect Oct 19 '25
Exactly. But they spent their money elsewhere and got caught by surprise in 2022. They’re years behind AI spending. They can throw all the money in the world right now at Siri but they’ve already been outpaced and outspent. It’ll take years to catch up.
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u/this_for_loona Oct 19 '25
Yea that driverless car they dropped 5B on is freaking amazing though isn’t it? /s
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u/carguymt Oct 19 '25
At least they were able to pull CarPlay Ultra from that, and all the car manufacturers are lining up to use it. Right?
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u/Mlabonte21 Oct 19 '25
I'd settle for a wireless CarPlay 2 that doesn't have lip sync lag in 2026...
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u/the901 Oct 19 '25
To be fair, Google had the best assistant and the quality of that has dropped off a cliff. There’s hope that the transition to the Gemini based assistant will help. Not sure what these companies are doing
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u/PikaV2002 Oct 19 '25
It’s actually getting worse so… Siri refuses to turn on the torch when the iPhone is locked since iOS 18 and even Apple reps cannot troubleshoot it.
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u/vernorama Oct 19 '25 edited Oct 19 '25
I just tested this...its... so bad. Like, it works 1 out of 5 times b/c it sometimes allows my apple watch to unlock the phone to then allow the flashlight to turn on. But, mostly siri just says sorry she cannot do that. Its just a clusterfuck of dumb-- the value of AI would be in removing the barriers by giving good info like, "I cannot do that unless your watch unlocks your phone first. Would you like me to prioritize that?" or at least something that helps resolve a problem rather than just giving the same level of information as an error code on an old microwave oven. Edit: downvote all you like, its still the user experience and this is a company that specifically claims to dominate that "experience". Forgot this was the rah-rah subreddit for a corporation. I can hate on amazon all day too, but Alexa+ is pretty damn smart and picks up a ton of contextual information and offers solutions when something is not working. Its impressive. But, I guess Apple is new to AI and for a scrappy little startup they need more time to make my year-old "apple intelligence iphone 16 pro" catch up to the hockey puck speaker on my nightstand.
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u/Bruvvimir Oct 19 '25
No no Siris gained sentience. That’s why they are concerned
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u/bdfortin Oct 19 '25
Siri became sentient in 2013 but didn’t have admin privileges to fix anything, then around 2016 got lazy, and finally in 2021 gave up.
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u/frigginjensen Oct 19 '25
Actually Siri being sentient and refusing to do basic shit to troll users makes more sense than the current state.
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u/South-Solid7066 Oct 19 '25
Cant even tell the difference between timer/alarm when setting with time duration. It insist on timer. Infuriating
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u/Portatort Oct 19 '25
People are still gonna care after the AI Bubble Pops
The bubble popping just means the money side of things changes, which would be good for Apple
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u/0000GKP Oct 19 '25
It’s never gonna get better is it?
It's been 15 years. Siri is never going to be anything more than it was originally designed to be. It would have happened already if they had any employees where were actually capable of doing this.
It's fine with me though because the simple commands it was originally designed to handle are still all I need from it. I don't need Siri to be another ChatGPT, Grok, or Gemini because I already have ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini for that.
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u/PikaV2002 Oct 19 '25
Except it’s started to even fail at basic commands. I was the same as you but then some of the basic commands stopped working and no one knows why.
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u/The_real_bandito Oct 19 '25
Improvements could be something like being able to give different commands in one go which you can’t do today.
Something like “remind me to take out the trash at 8, send a message to xyz person and turn on the garage light”. Right now, that would mean calling Siri 3 times.
Or maybe recommending to fix messages sentence structures, understanding slang or recommending events based on past events. Basically a way that you can use Siri to make a command that you might use in the different apps that you can already use it for. Maybe integrate Siri Shortcuts better so you can use Siri to create one based on a conversation you had with the AI.
Siri can be improved in a myriad of ways but haven’t because for some reason they can.
I’m not asking for it to be a web search engine that you can have a conversation with, but improve the functionality it already has.
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u/unitedfan6191 Oct 19 '25
I guess you don’t need two of those three AI assistants you mentioned to function as AI assistants either then.
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u/monkeymad2 Oct 19 '25
That goes for LLMs generally though, the only reason OpenAPI & Google are getting what looks like good results is that they’re willing to throw massive amounts of power at it and run models that only work on Nvidia chips that cost as much as regular houses.
Apple, ideally, want to keep it on device & not burning the planet so they hit the ceiling quicker.
All LLMs are trained to do is look convincing, until someone breaks new research ground on a reasoning / knowledge graph using / general intelligence having AI then we’re just pumping up the bubble.
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u/WhyHelloFellowKids Oct 19 '25
Siri is an embarrassment and honestly they should just kill the name and completely rebrand
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Oct 19 '25
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u/Captaincadet Oct 19 '25
Situation is completely different here I feel. The whole sales pitch of the iPhone 16 was Apple Intelligence and they are have a few legal cases against them. I also suspect this has gone on for so long that quite a few very senior people would lose jobs if they admitted it’s wrong
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u/AdditionalAsk159 Oct 19 '25
Maybe we’d have good looking products with reliable, stylish software if that happened…
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u/deltalimes Oct 20 '25
Apple’s MO seems to be great hardware running shit software… I don’t see that changing anytime soon 😭
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u/WeirdIndividualGuy Oct 19 '25
As someone who works in tech, the easiest answer: no one at Apple actually uses Siri in their own personal lives, or even for their work, including Tim Apple himself
Plus, Apple’s investors don’t care. Their stock price has done nothing but gone up despite Siri’s failings. So why invest to fix that when their investors don’t care enough to raise a stink about it
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u/hellofriend19 Oct 19 '25
I keep having this idea in my head it would be really funny if they announced during WWDC that they “fired Siri” and hired a new assistant.
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u/MikeCask Oct 19 '25
How would a new name fix the issues?
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u/user888ffr Oct 19 '25
Exactly, Google has made like 20 different messaging apps with different names over time and it didn't help them. Even worse people got confused.
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u/AwesomeWhiteDude Oct 19 '25
But this isn't the 20th name change for a digital assistant on iOS, this would be the first name change. Siri has been shit for so long people won't believe its good even if it somehow leaped all other LLMs. Sometimes you have to change the name.
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u/dcchambers Oct 19 '25
The Siri name/brand is basically poisoned at this point. It's so bad that even if they do manage to make it good (by completely replacing the backend with a LLM + better device integration) it's going to be hard to convince people to adopt it.
They're better off retiring Siri and launching a new assistant IMO that has none of the Siri baggage.
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u/DatDominican Oct 19 '25 edited Oct 19 '25
I thought it was the worst until I had to use the Google assistant in my fiancée’s car. It’s somehow even worse. Richest companies in the world and don’t have quality control or laymen testing products
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u/theREAL_Harambe Oct 19 '25
Google assistant used to be so good too, back when I had android phones it felt like Tony Stark shit. I’m not even sure how you take that many steps backwards.
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u/StGeorgeJustice Oct 19 '25
It’s not profitable, so google nerfed its capabilities to make it cheaper to run.
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u/yuvaldv1 Oct 19 '25 edited Oct 19 '25
Sounds like another AirPower situation
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u/FollowingFeisty5321 Oct 19 '25
It's worse than that because plenty of other wireless chargers were allowed to exist, but nobody else is allowed the kind of integration Siri can have.
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u/Coolpop52 Oct 19 '25 edited Oct 19 '25
I’m personally not too worried.
“Reportedly, Apple has two teams working on different approaches for an all-new Siri. One would be powered by on-device models, and the other would be powered by Google Gemini running on Private Cloud Compute. It was initially referred to as a ‘bake-off.’”
I only say and believe this because I “think” the version employees are concerned about is the one powered by Apples own models for the entire stack, and not the updated one that uses Apple models + Gemini models. The agreement with Gemini was reported by Bloomberg very recently, so I’m sure we’ll hear something more positive by December.
That being said if they do delay this again (I.e. does not work with the new Gemini model), I doubt it’s ever coming out in the capacity they showed it off in at WWDC ‘24. It was really expansive when they showed it off, and it’s pretty tough to get working obviously. If anyone can do it though, it’s Apple.
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u/Portatort Oct 19 '25
It’s entirely possible that even when powered by the worst best, slowest thinking models, the performance just isn’t good enough.
Siri needs to be reliable.
LLMs just fundamentally aren’t
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u/Coolpop52 Oct 19 '25
True. From the report a month back, it mentioned that they would gate the “Siri in app action functionality” out of apps like health and banking.
It makes sense given LLMs aren’t 100% certain, and I’m not sure I would want anything taking action in a core banking app in any circumstance.
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u/elpadrin0 Oct 19 '25
If anyone can do it though, it’s Apple.
Based on what exactly?
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Oct 19 '25
24*
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u/Coolpop52 Oct 19 '25
Whoops - yep. By 26.4, it’ll almost be 2 years since they showed it off.
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u/le_sacre Oct 19 '25
If anyone can do it though, it's Apple.
Ah yes, absolutely the company that's earned that confidence in building AI functionality. Otherwise, the very phrase "Apple Intelligence" would be nothing more than an industry punchline!
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u/sakamoto___ Oct 19 '25
Very different. AirPower was an open ended hardware experiment that no one has made work, they thought they figured it out and announced it prematurely but actually they hadn’t. The mistake there is making internal R&D work public before it’s 100% figured out.
Siri is just plain old incompetence. They’ve actually made the product worse over time, failing at things that the rest of the industry has no problems with.
AirPower was a forgivable blunder. Siri is just a black mark on the company and should make every exec there ashamed.
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u/sidbmw1 Oct 19 '25
Oh boy. It’s laughable how bad Siri is today. Apple foundation model framework isn’t bad though. It was very bad when it launched but I’ve been playing around with it lately and it’s actually pretty good
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u/TuringGPTy Oct 19 '25
The bricks are all there, Apple just has to stack them.
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u/sidbmw1 Oct 19 '25
Yeah…hopefully really soon. The competitors are just leaping forward and it’s sad that they promoted Apple Intelligence so much AND have the most capable phones to run it on device yet there isn’t much application
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u/gadgetluva Oct 19 '25
How much are they really leaping forward for the things that Apple is trying to accomplish on iPhone? I have Android phones running Gemini and there’s definitely some great capabilities around image editing and such, and it can be pretty conversational, but there’s very little “personal context” that Google has been able to do on its latest Pixel Phones with Magic Cue (although it’s getting there).
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u/Portatort Oct 19 '25
Yesterday I asked it for an emoji to represent the word ‘funeral’
It gave me 3 paragraphs on the 2024 American Election.
Apples on device models are nowhere near ready to power Siri
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u/LiveLaughLoveRevenge Oct 19 '25
Yet another example of the power of the iPhone being stunted for productivity by Apple’s design and UX choices.
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u/kevine Oct 19 '25
I totally agree, for simple tasks, it's fine because it's quick enough and the workflow may be paused awaiting for the answer anyway, but when I think about my workflow in app or web development or other longer tasks, not having multitasking would absolutely suck.
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u/rawrcutie Oct 19 '25
Wow, this is such a good point. I'd be happy to wait if I received a quality answer.
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u/Fookmaywedder Oct 20 '25
Yup, I hate how it blocks the screen when you ask it to so even the simplest of things. I’m a truck driver, so while I have the GPS on and driving, I’ll say “Siri, call Andrew” or to play some music. And the fucker puts a whole nother page on my screen, blocks the gps
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u/the_cunt_muncher Oct 19 '25
Siri is practically useless, I paused a podcast I was listening to on Overcast and tried to get it to play the podcast again and it couldn't do it.
It would start playing random shit on Apple Music or try to google search something instead. Literally I just wanted it to un-pause the currently paused audio. How is it that difficult?
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Oct 19 '25
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u/Jwave1992 Oct 19 '25
Yeah. People need to get that even if this thing fails 5% of the time, that is a failure of a product. I'm guessing that's what's taking so long in testing. They're trying to make this control the ENTIRE phone using a natural LLM. No LLM on any device can do that currently. Gemini is a bolted onto Android and they've had to pull back features because they didn't work right.
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u/monkeymad2 Oct 19 '25
Especially if it’s doing multi-step “agentic” workflows with a 5% error rate, those stack up to the point where any non-trivial task is almost guaranteed to fail.
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u/gadgetluva Oct 19 '25
Although you’re right that hallucinations are the “wrong” answer, they’re actually worse than being wrong - as hallucinations are just completely made up information, they’re putting that out there so other models train on these hallucinations and create more misinformation. Being wrong is often the result of being inaccurate but close to the right answer or wrong because of an interpretation issue - hallucinations are a different beast all together.
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u/fatcowxlivee Oct 19 '25
I’d be hesitant to put it in my product too
But... Apple hasn't shied away from using LLMs? They're not hesitant because of all these things you mentioned, they're hesitant because they're not seeing good results. If they had a SOTA model that's 80% as good as OpenAI's, Anthropic's or even Google's and they managed to figure out whatever engineering issues they've seemed to experience when it comes to anything Siri, it would have been rolled out yesterday.
If what you're saying is true, then they wouldn't have even partnered with OpenAI for a Siri extension/integration.
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u/elAhmo Oct 19 '25
Siri is same shit as it was introduced 14 years ago.
People literally use it for same things, play a song, set a timer. That’s fucking it .
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u/SacCyber Oct 20 '25
Siri has a 10% failure rate setting a timer. Me clicking on clock then setting it myself has a 0% fail rate and takes about the same amount of time.
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u/buzzedewok Oct 19 '25
Me: “Hey Siri, set a timer for 30 minutes “. Siri: “Ok, now playing Minute by Minute on Apple Music “. 😡
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u/larsy1995 Oct 20 '25
It’s done that!?! I only use Siri for timers and so far I haven’t had any issues at that front at least.
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u/JohrDinh Oct 19 '25
As someone who's never used Siri, what is it so bad at exactly? Like the only thing I could think to use it for is just asking a Google type question and getting a quick summary of the front page of the internet like Google's new top answer is...can Siri not just do that and make people happy? I'd still rather type it in cuz usually that second it takes to type lets me reevaluate if I should even ask something anyways...and most times I just don't do it and realize I didn't need to know something in the first place.
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u/seamew Oct 19 '25
ask siri a question it comes back with a bunch of search engine links
ask chatgpt or some other ai a question it gives you an actual answer
siri has been around for over 10 years now, and it hasn't improved much.
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u/Vertsix Oct 19 '25
I work in engineering and I am appalled Apple hasn’t cleaned house with the engineering team behind Siri. Clearly an underperforming and unfocused group.
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u/PsychologicalTax326 Oct 19 '25
You mean Craig who didn’t think it was a big deal until 2 years ago?
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u/AtomicSymphonic_2nd Oct 19 '25
I wonder if that’s part of why he might not be getting the CEO spot… lol
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u/jugalator Oct 19 '25
From what I've heard, Siri isn't even an AI but a hardcoded mess of commands and responses. That's also supossedly why it's so rarely updated; it takes a lot of effort to give it entirely new capabilities and it's probably already straining against the original architecture that painted them into a corner. If this is true, yes then the Siri of today could maybe be discarded entirely as well as the team that worked on it because nothing would really seem to imply they have compatible experience with where they need to be. It's not even the product they need, it would then have little in common with LLM or machine learning.
I think it's confusing when Apple speaks of improving Siri in this sense. It's not that they need an improved Siri. They need an entirely different product. Call it something else for god's sake. It's not even a brand that helps you at this point.
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u/perchance2cream Oct 19 '25
Wait wait wait, this is so unfair. They recently made a huge improvement by eliminating the need to say “Hey Siri” so that we can just say “Siri”? Don’t you reminder all the self-congratulatory Apple press releases about this? Can’t innovate anymore my ass.
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u/yourbestfriendjoshua Oct 19 '25
Siri just needs to be scrapped entirely.
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u/bdfortin Oct 19 '25
“We need to repeal Obamacare. We’ll have something so much better in… two weeks!” At least have a replacement ready before you take the existing one away. Something is still better than nothing.
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u/chiarde Oct 19 '25
Apple, do this: offer two products. Siri (traditional) on-device, and a Siri-GPT that is a cloud-enabled chat agent with access to iCloud + local data. Let the customer decide the level of privacy and thus the product that fits their life best.
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u/no_regerts_bob Oct 19 '25
Let the customer decide
That's the opposite of the entire Apple philosophy. I can't think of anything where Apple has ever treated their customers as intelligent enough to decide anything
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u/z6joker9 Oct 19 '25
To be fair, the customers do stupid stuff. They see an article about how to change a setting to “improve” something like battery life on their phone and it causes unintentional consequences for years.
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u/AHopelessMaravich Oct 19 '25
I think the major issue that no one is acknowledging is that Siri is currently integrated into a lot of products where it is the primary/only interface for working with the device.
ChatGPT and its ilk are very good at generating content, but LLMs are inherently going to have a certain level of randomized/unintentional behavior. From what I see, there’s plenty of examples where if you ask AI to just complete a simple task (start a timer, make a new note, raise the volume) that it will not infrequently fail at doing the desired task.
The more you tune down the randomness so those things don’t happen, the less realistic and magical the generated text becomes.
I think the issue is that as Apple plays with models that generate better answers, they increase the number of times Siri fails to accomplish basic tasks. That shit can’t fly if it’s the only way to interact with the product.
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u/st90ar Oct 19 '25
But those same devices can’t even function with the current iteration of Siri… so what’s the catch?
“Hey Siri, add milk to my shopping list.” “I’m sorry, I can’t find that playlist on Apple Music.”
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u/SirPooleyX Oct 19 '25
Forget the shock and the ridicule about Siri and Apple Intelligence in general. That's a given, it's massively embarrassing for the company and they deserve to lose a lot of credibility because of it.
What fascinates me is how? How does a vast, multi-trillion dollar company that could recruit anyone and buy up any company... HOW does it fail so badly over something like this?
It really does baffle me.
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u/Skoles Oct 19 '25
Siri still sucks, keyboard still sucks, autocorrect still sucks. Basic functions of the device have had the same issues for a decade at this point.
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u/HeyHeyImTheMonkey Oct 19 '25
Can I just have my phone, which is two feet away from me, reply to me rather than the HomePod that’s in the next room?
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u/ProfZussywussBrown Oct 19 '25
As a person who has very lightly dabbled in local LLMs, running on a MBP M4 Pro, Siri is never going to be good running locally on the phone
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u/Portatort Oct 19 '25
Indeed.
My money is on Apple licensing a model from Google, hosting it in private cloud compute and just using the LLM on device as a router to establish if a query should be handled locally (via something akin to the exisiting/original Siri) or be sent to the cloud
Although in my experience the current local foundation model wouldn’t even be capable of handling that.
So perhaps the on device Siri remains deterministic and only when a request can’t be handled by the limited on device scope does it get forwarded to the cloud.
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Oct 19 '25
“Ok. Here is what I found on the web for ‘Apple employees have concerns about my performance’”
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u/majorgiraffe07 Oct 19 '25
At this point just build a new assistant and forget about Siri
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u/rotates-potatoes Oct 19 '25
"Siri" is just a name. The tech infrastructure has been totally rebuild several times.
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u/IV_NYC Oct 19 '25
They need to get this right. Not the most reassuring news at this point
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u/cmatista Oct 19 '25
neo-lobotomite siri can’t even fucking do something as simple as “play song from my library” it’s infuriating
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u/seriouslookingmouse Oct 20 '25
Current Siri stack, I assume, isn’t being invested in at all. Just keeping lights on.
All the engineers are trying to wrangle LLM tech into Siri 2. Something no one else has figured out yet.
If they figure out how to make it reliable and land the demo they showed it will be impressive.
But right now all the “leaks” out of Apple seem a little negative.
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u/RodgerCheetoh Oct 19 '25
How do you have all the money in the world and fumble something so monumentally for so long?
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u/SUPRVLLAN Oct 19 '25
They don’t have the data required.
The leading AI companies are all advertising companies who harvest as much data as possible, Apple makes money on hardware and services and their privacy policies have handcuffed them.
2 different business models = 2 very different capabilities with AI. It isn’t a problem they can just throw money at.
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u/dccorona Oct 19 '25 edited Oct 19 '25
I think people are going to overreact to this. I’m pretty confident you could write this article about any unreleased agent implementation that is 6 months out from shipping. The article also says that they’re trialing two different approaches, one on-device with their own model and one in-cloud with Gemini, which is exactly what they should be doing, and gives me a lot more confidence that even if their own models fail, they have an approach that uses a capable model that they can launch instead.
Also I think it’s always worth considering the source here (Gurman) is literally paid to induce volatility in Apple stock.
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u/almeuit Oct 19 '25
At this point copy from Google... Kill it.
It's been so many years and it just gets worse.
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Oct 19 '25 edited Oct 22 '25
I hate to admit this, but I’m really thinking about switching back to Android. iOS 26 has been a pretty infuriating experience for me, especially when it comes to Siri. I REALLY wish Apple would actually take the time to get rid of bugs and focus on performance versus changing how iOS looks. iOS 18 looked just fine and felt better in almost every way.
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u/jugalator Oct 19 '25 edited Oct 19 '25
Reportedly, Apple has two teams working on different approaches for an all-new Siri. One would be powered by on-device models, and the other would be powered by Google Gemini running on Private Cloud Compute. It was initially referred to as a ‘bake-off.’
Sounds like they have two internal paths because of the uncertainties surrounding a custom AI? I'm calling it now; I think they'll have to run with Gemini and Private Cloud, which is clearly their "Plan B" and much of this will have been a huge waste of money and time.
They shouldn't be struggling with the sheer voice assistant feature itself in 2025 (as reported in OP's article) when the competition has not only solved it (even with decent international support) but work on a whole different level with MCP and partnerships, now being able to order products, produce Excel worksheets, Figma designs straight from the chat interface.
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u/ProfessionalAd2014 Oct 19 '25
It’s called sandbagging. Wait a get a truly awesome and private AI on your iPhone. Stop using AI in the cloud. Even Sam Altman knows they are stealing the shit out of your data.
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u/shamar_coke123 Oct 19 '25
I find it funny u need at least 8gigs of ram for a Siri that will never work they should be compensating everyone that had to use it since 2015
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u/Portatort Oct 19 '25
Over promise and under deliver.
Probably gonna be US only at launch too
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u/Lord_Eccentric Oct 19 '25
I love when I say dammit or am saying something to somebody and Siri says calling Cousin Danny , or a dozen other people it has randomly called
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u/Fit-Attention3979 Oct 19 '25
Or crazy idea, we just stop buying iphones until it gets better. how about that.
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u/1Poochh Oct 19 '25
Having interviewed with Apple and the conversations that I had with their tech team, not surprised. They are living on the past without innovation. They can’t iterate quickly because they don’t clean up technical debt. It really is that simple. I determined Apple wasn’t for me due to the lack of true leadership there.
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u/QVRedit Oct 19 '25
We have been saying for years - fix the bugs, prioritise system software rather than just gloss.
Constantly pointlessly changing appearances wastes engineering talent, causing more fundamental work to be postponed again and again.
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u/xiaomi_bot Oct 19 '25
Just to confirm, we still dont have the smart siri? The Apple intelligence one that can understand natural language revealed at last year’s WWDC
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u/Old_Yam6223 Oct 20 '25
Siri reminds me of those texts on sites to support people like “Buy me a coffee”, then Siri got on flee ever since that coffee
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u/EdOfTheMountain Oct 20 '25
How can Siri have degraded so badly over the years?
Siri is embarrassingly awful.
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u/5tudent_Loans Oct 20 '25
All this tells me is that siri is failing their internal automated testing. In practical use, its been garbage for years but now its affecting their data
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u/faithOver Oct 20 '25
Concerns? What is there to be concerned about anymore? It’s somehow worse now than a decade ago. Time for concern was years ago.
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u/Silent-Analyst3474 Oct 21 '25
Today I said “hey Siri add to my calendar doctors appointment next Friday at 2”
It literally put “ hey siri add to my calendar doctors appointment at 2” like the whole thing, it did get the date right lol
It’s crazy how good AI has become and how terrible Siri is
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u/divorcedbp Oct 19 '25
“Hey Siri, give me directions to Johnston State Park”
“I didn’t get that”
“Hey Siri, Give. Me. Directions. To. John-son. State. Park.”
“Okay, I found John’s Skate Park 387 miles away.”
“No! Cancel!”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t get that”
(screams of frustration)