Siri, explain how you became Apple’s most embarrassing failure

Plenty of teenagers refuse to answer questions. But not many provoke the same frustration as Siri, Apple’s 13-year-old voice assistant.

“Has Siri been getting worse for anyone else?” one exasperated iPhone owner asks on a Reddit discussion board. “[It’s] worse than when it was first introduced,” says another.

“I actually hate Siri with everything inside of me,” reads a further post, laced with venom rarely reserved for computer programs.

Installed on more than 2bn Apple devices, the ever-present voice assistant is one of the world’s most widely available pieces of software. But for many users, the virtual assistant is more of an unwelcome irritation than a helpful aide.

And in recent weeks, Apple’s Siri conundrum has boiled over into one of the company’s biggest crises in years. Earlier this month, the tech giant delayed a long-promised overhaul, pushing back a planned rewrite of the assistant indefinitely.

Apple has told staff that the delays, nine months after it promised the new features, were “ugly and embarrassing”.

The setback led to Tim Cook, the chief executive, last week stripping John Giannandrea, Apple’s Scottish-born AI chief, of responsibility for Siri after reportedly losing confidence in him.

The next tech gold rush

Delays and bugs are never welcome at Apple, which prides itself on the flawless synergy of its gadgets and software working together.

But its public fumbles come as a wave of other tech companies, some of which did not exist when Siri was first released, come up with highly capable AI chatbots.

As Silicon Valley predicts that systems such as ChatGPT are on the verge of “AGI” (artificial general intelligence) – a process that will see AI capable of accomplishing tasks just as competently as humans can – it does not reflect well on Apple that Siri still struggles to set a timer.

Interacting with the bot is certainly a long way from talking to Samantha, the AI system voiced by Scarlett Johansson from the Hollywood film Her, to which it has often been compared.

Users complain that the bot often fails to interpret simple commands, from setting alarms to playing songs.

In one viral recent exchange, asking “What month is it?” would elicit answers from “Sorry, I don’t understand” to “It is 2025”.

“Siri has been Apple’s albatross for quite a while now,” says Dipanjan Chatterjee, an analyst at Forrester. “It has always promised so much and delivered so little.

“That was still tolerable when Siri was up against Alexa and Hey Google, both of which stumbled along. However, the [new] Gen AI-fuelled chatbots have demonstrated what excellent voice interaction can be like, and there is no place for Siri to hide any more.”

Apple’s struggles with Siri are unlikely to have a huge impact on sales of the iPhone, the company’s most important product and its key source of revenue.

But investors are fretting that the fiasco demonstrates how the company is falling behind in AI, seen as the next technological gold rush.

Shares in the company have fallen by 9pc this year, greater than the 5.5pc drop in the tech-heavy Nasdaq composite.

Incremental progress

When Apple unveiled Siri in October 2011 – a day before Steve Jobs’ death – then software chief Scott Forstall impressed onlookers by demonstrating the bot’s ability to respond to queries about the weather, reply to text messages and set up meetings. Reviewers called it “mind-blowing”.

Forstall, however, was fired a year later after the botched launch of Apple Maps, and Siri has made only incremental progress since then.

Executives were also reportedly blind-sided by the launch of Amazon’s Alexa.

“It’s a challenging problem,” Apple executive Eddy Cue conceded to The Wall Street Journal in 2017, when asked about Siri’s ongoing struggles.

The software’s piece-by-piece development reportedly led to its underlying code becoming patchy, fuelling bugs and delays when processing questions. It has also led to the perception that Siri has deteriorated over time.

In an attempt to regain the initiative, Apple hired Giannandrea in 2018, a marquee appointment from Google.

But the arrival of ChatGPT in late 2022 once again highlighted Siri’s deficiencies. Investors fretted that Apple’s commitment to privacy meant it would struggle to match other chatbots that rely on crunching huge quantities of data.

Cook promised a response, and last year, Apple announced a sweeping overhaul of Siri as part of a wider AI push it dubbed “Apple Intelligence”.

In June 2024, it struck a deal with OpenAI to augment Siri’s answers with ChatGPT and promised that within a year, it would launch a “more personalised Siri” capable of using all the data on an iPhone to form a powerful assistant.

Under plans for “Siri 2”, the assistant would be able to dig through texts, emails and other apps to find answers. Ask the chatbot “When is mum’s flight landing?”, and it would check recent messages, cross-reference them with plane-tracking data, and provide a real-time answer.

However, months passed without any sign of the new version, and Apple was forced to pull other existing AI features. In January, the company suspended a new feature that generated summaries of headlines from news after complaints from organisations, including the BBC.

Earlier this month, Apple acknowledged that it could not say when the Siri overhaul would arrive, saying: “It’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features.”

‘Something is rotten’

According to Bloomberg, Apple executives told staff that the delays were “embarrassing” and “ugly”, and said the company had promoted the Siri revamp before it was ready.

Robby Walker, a senior director at Apple, pointed the finger at the company’s marketing team for seeking to promote the features ahead of time. A week later, Giannandrea was reportedly sidelined, with Mike Rockwell, the head of the Vision Pro headset, put in charge of Siri.

The uncharacteristic own-goal led to a wave of criticism. John Gruber, a long-time Apple follower, said that “something is rotten” at the company, while Ming-Chi Kuo, a well-connected analyst, said Cook should apologise.

Apple is now facing a false advertising lawsuit from customers who said they bought new iPhones on the premise that they would receive features such as the new Siri. Apple has not yet responded to the lawsuit.

Mr Chatterjee, of Forrester, says: “There is cause for concern but not for panic.”

He says the company has plenty of loyal customers, but that the company’s recent challenges have dimmed hopes of an upgrade “super cycle” to boost sales.

The problems getting Siri to work might be understandable in isolation, but they come amid a series of Apple initiatives that have missed the mark.

The company invested billions of pounds into an electric car project that it eventually scrapped a year ago.

Its Vision Pro headset – the company’s biggest new idea since the iPhone – has disappointed, with plans for an upgraded model reportedly in flux.

Benedict Evans, the tech analyst, recently pondered whether Siri’s failings were symptomatic of a “[Windows] Vista-like drift into systemically poor execution”, referring to the botched launch of the Microsoft operating system 19 years ago.

Breaking out of that slump and catching up to rapidly expanding AI rivals may require the company to ask significant questions of itself.

However, it is unlikely to get any help from Siri. Ask the bot: “When are you going to be smarter?” and it will respond: “Sorry, I don’t understand.”