Apple Intelligence has arrived, but Siri and Apple’s AI suite of features are nowhere near the level of rivals OpenAI, Anthropic, and others — especially with the absence of an Apple chatbot. For that reason, the company has recruited an internal software veteran to help course correct the path for Apple’s AI efforts. Mark Gurman at Bloomberg has the report:
Apple Inc. executive Kim Vorrath, a company veteran known for fixing troubled products and bringing major projects to market, has a new job: whipping artificial intelligence and Siri into shape.
Vorrath, a vice president in charge of program management, was moved to Apple’s artificial intelligence and machine learning division this week, according to people with knowledge of the matter. She’ll be a top deputy to AI chief John Giannandrea, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the change hasn’t been announced publicly.
Gurman adds that Vorrath was instrumental in recently getting Apple Vision Pro to market. Prior to that, she helped see the original iPhone software group with project management. He reports that she previously advised the group that reports to John Giannandrea
Prior to joining Giannandrea’s organization, Vorrath had spent several weeks advising Kelsey Peterson, the group’s previous head of program management. Peterson will now report to Vorrath — as will two other AI executives, Cindy Lin and Marc Schonbrun. Giannandrea, who joined Apple from Google in 2018, disclosed the changes in a memo sent to staffers.
Apple still has to ship the AI-infused version of Siri that it showed off during a preview of iOS 18 at its developer conference in June 2024. The current integration is rather limited. We expect that version of Siri to arrive in beta as soon as iOS 18.4 beta now that iOS 18.3 is days away from arriving for the public.
Details on what to expect from the new Siri when it gets the Apple Intelligence upgrade:
With onscreen awareness, Siri will be able to understand and take action with users’ content in more apps over time. For example, if a friend texts a user their new address in Messages, the receiver can say, “Add this address to his contact card.”
With Apple Intelligence, Siri will be able to take hundreds of new actions in and across Apple and third-party apps. For example, a user could say, “Bring up that article about cicadas from my Reading List,” or “Send the photos from the barbecue on Saturday to Malia,” and Siri will take care of it.
Siri will be able to deliver intelligence that’s tailored to the user and their on-device information. For example, a user can say, “Play that podcast that Jamie recommended,” and Siri will locate and play the episode, without the user having to remember whether it was mentioned in a text or an email. Or they could ask, “When is Mom’s flight landing?” and Siri will find the flight details and cross-reference them with real-time flight tracking to give an arrival time.
iOS 18.3, however, illustrates some of the challenges for Apple’s artificial intelligence challenges. For example, Apple has opted to disable notification summaries for news and entertainment alerts after a flurry of inaccurate summaries misinformed users. Other notification summaries will appear in italicized text to denote the summary format compared to the actual text of the notification.
Read the latest report from Bloomberg for the full story.
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