Rotten in Cupertino ⇥ daringfireball.net

John Gruber wrote an appropriately scathing piece about Apple’s inability to deliver improvements to Siri. It is a much needed perspective from someone who receives press briefings and demos, and is therefore able to better gauge Apple’s likely progress on these features. It is not looking good:

We didn’t get to try any of the Apple Intelligence features ourselves. There was no Apple Intelligence “hands on”. But we did see a bunch of features demoed, live, by Apple folks. In my above hierarchy of realness, they were all at level 1.

But we didn’t see all aspects of Apple Intelligence demoed. None of the “more personalized Siri” features, the ones that Apple, in its own statement announcing their postponement, described as having “more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps”. Those features encompass three main things: […]

There were no demonstrations of any of that. Those features were all at level 0 on my hierarchy. That level is called vaporware. They were features Apple said existed, which they claimed would be shipping in the next year, and which they portrayed, to great effect, in the signature “Siri, when is my mom’s flight landing?” segment of the WWDC keynote itself, starting around the 1h:22m mark. Apple was either unwilling or unable to demonstrate those features in action back in June, even with Apple product marketing reps performing the demos from a prepared script using prepared devices.

Those are personal context, onscreen awareness, and in-app actions. As Gruber astutely broke down the existing Apple Intelligence features by their degree of reality, I think it is worth picking apart these three, even though Apple is lumping them together under the “more personalized Siri” banner.

The first of these was described by Craig Federighi at the Talk Show Live as comprising data already indexed by Spotlight.¹ If this is accurate, that now-pulled commercial in which Bella Ramsey asks Siri “what’s the name of the guy I had a meeting with a couple of months ago at Cafe Grenel?” seems entirely plausible. I can search my phone for a location — say, my barber’s shop — and Spotlight will return previous appointments there. If I ask Siri the same thing, it converts the name of the shop to an address but it cannot find any events past or future, for some reason. (This is true of all types of appointments I tried. I have an upcoming Apple Store appointment and, while it interpreted me correctly when I asked it for upcoming appointments at the store, it could not find one in my calendar.) It is not news that Siri is bad, but there is a kernel of this functionality already present in Siri. It needs to be able to search past appointments, convert “a couple of months ago” into a reasonable date span, and then connect it to other attendees in the event — but all of this is based on data already indexed.

Onscreen awareness and in-app actions both seem far more ambitious. The former is not nearly as dependent on new third-party developer support in the way in-app actions would be. Simon Willison speculates the holdup could be related to security concerns. Gruber assumes — fairly — none of these features work properly. Note how the “Cafe Grenel” ad involves what I take to be the simplest version of personalized Siri, and even that is unable to be shown to the press. While Apple included the “mom’s flight” example in the keynote, it has — thankfully — not shown an ad with anything nearly so complex.

If Apple could demonstrate a more functional Siri, I imagine it would have done so by now. That feels like the bare minimum and it seems not even that modest Spotlight-based improvement is able to be shown. The best case, right now, is that some of these features work, but only some of the time. Yet Apple decided it could present all of them way too early. We can no longer assume Apple’s WWDC presentation is a reflection of reality, nor that its public roadmap is anything more than words on a page — not until someone outside of Apple can say they have seen this work. I do not trust Siri and, right now, I also do not trust Apple to tell me what the status is with Siri, either.