Apple is reassuring employees on the Siri team who may be feeling demotivated by the recent Siri delays and the bad press surrounding the company's decisions, reports Bloomberg.
In a Siri team meeting, Apple senior director Robby Walker acknowledged that employees might be feeling "angry, disappointed, burned out and embarrassed" following the Siri delay, but he praised the hard work of employees and the "incredibly impressive" features they developed, saying that Apple would continue to work to "ship the world's greatest virtual assistant" to Apple users. "I saw so many people giving everything they had in order to make this happen and to make incredible progress together," he said.
The situation was described as "ugly" because the Siri features were shown off in public with marketing campaigns and TV commercials before there was a fully functional product. Siri's new functionality was also tied to the iPhone 16 launch in advertising, and it was a feature that Apple used to promote its iPhone 16 models.
Apple decided to delay the functionality because of quality issues, with Walker telling employees that Siri's new features were only working properly 60 to 80 percent of the time.
To encourage employees, Walker demonstrated Siri locating his driver's license number, manipulating apps by embedding content in an email and adding recipients, and finding specific photos of a child. Employees on the Siri team will be able to use time away to recharge and prepare for "hard work ahead."
Walker told employees that it is not yet clear when the new Siri features will be ready for launch, but Apple's statement about the delay mentioned "in the coming year." That has been interpreted as 2026, or in an update to the iOS 19 operating system launching this fall.
Walker said that Apple is aiming for iOS 19, but that the timeline "doesn't mean that we're shipping then." Apple will ship the Siri functions when they're ready to launch, and the company does not want to provide the public with unfinished features, even if "competitors might have launched them in this state or worse."
"We have other commitments across Apple to other projects," Walker said, citing new software and hardware initiatives. "We want to keep our commitments to those, and we understand those are now potentially more timeline-urgent than the features that have been deferred." He said decisions on timing will be made on a "case-by-case basis" as work progresses on products planned for next year.
"Customers are not expecting only these new features but they also want a more fully rounded-out Siri," he said. "We're going to ship these features and more as soon as they are ready."
According to Bloomberg, Apple does not have plans to fire Siri chief John Giannandrea or any other Siri executives at this time, though there have been discussions about moving additional senior executives under Giannandrea to speed up development.
