Siri What happened in the past 7 years since it was acquired by Apple?
compiled | Wang Yuxin, Edison Ke, Rik R
Source | The Information
Author | Aaron Tilley, Kevin McLaughlin
2011 The "Let's talk iPhone" launch conference held at the headquarters in Cupertino, California was a critical moment for Apple. This is the first show of the new CEO Cook .
Apple's legend - Steve Jobs' health is getting worse and worse, and Cook takes over the burden. However, this press conference was a bit disappointing, and the new iPhone 5 was not launched. The company's new iPhone 4s is just an update to iPhone 4. The appearance of
Siri saved the press conference.
Apple has released its AI assistant and demonstrated Siri's responsiveness to voice commands by commanding Siri to create reminders, arrange future events on the calendar, and provide information about restaurants or weather.
Comments have been amazed by Siri's potential, predicting that Apple may have developed another revolutionary product.
consumers also seem to be very interested. Three days after the release of iPhone 4s, Apple had already sold 4 million devices, becoming the fastest-selling iPhone phone at that time.
. The timeline has been 7 years later, Siri is now causing Apple a headache.
When Apple's $349 smart speaker HomePod was released, some critics believed that Siri would lead to poor sales of this product.
As expected, although this speaker has won numerous praises for its stylish appearance and sound quality, after user experience, comments on Siri features such as "slow", "annoying" and "embarrassing" make the HomePod a bad reputation.
loses its advantage
Siri was once considered Apple's next important innovation, but seven years after its release, it was the most criticized feature in the new product and became a drag.
This article will mainly show how Apple has turned Siri with a bright future into a major problem for the company.
To determine how Apple squanders its big advantages in front of digital assistant competitors Amazon and Google, foreign media The Information interviewed more than a dozen former Apple employees who were responsible for creating Siri or integrating it into Apple's ecosystem.
Most people only agreed to speak anonymously because they signed a confidentiality agreement and some were worried that Apple executives would retaliate against it.
From the perspective and perspective of employees, we can deeply understand Apple's efforts to reshape the company from another perspective.
Apple hopes that it will not only be unique in hardware design, but also successfully become a company that builds innovative and efficient online services.
Apple has taken some detours in its efforts to build an online business—especially in the services of its subsidiary iCloud.
As iPhone sales continue to slow, the challenges companies have faced in the online service sector may also hurt the company.
This is the first time, and several former Apple employees admitted that Apple has rushed to add Siri to the iPhone 4s phone before the technology matures, which has also caused controversy within the company. In the next version iteration, should
be patched or should it be completely overturned? The debate has grown intensified since the birth of Siri, and it is only a small part of the many quarrels.
Siri's teams gradually evolved into an uncontrollable group, participating in various small-scale factional battles, and making heated debates about the ideal version of Siri - whether it should be a quick and accurate information acquirer or a digital assistant familiar with complex tasks.
What caused all this was the changing team leaders and middle-level managers who lacked the vision or influence that Jobs had, who died of pancreatic cancer the day after Apple launched Siri.
These former employees said that lack of leadership and changing management have suppressed Siri's key advancements, the most critical reason is that they failed to open up Apple's infamous closed culture and failed to give outside developers more opportunities to create more useful Siri applications.
Siri's division was run by Bill Stasior, a quiet and low-key engineer who was previously an Amazon search expert and joined Apple in late 2012.
Stasior is responsible for Siri's core technologies - speech recognition system, natural language processing system and various search functions of Apple. Former Siri employees said the above departments competed with each other for more attention and resources, and often clashed with each other.
A spokesperson for Apple refused to let Stasior be interviewed. In a written statement, a spokesperson called Siri "the world's most popular voice assistant" touted Siri's ability to work on company devices.
"We have made significant progress in Siri's performance, scalability and reliability, and have adopted the latest machine learning technology to create more natural sound and more proactive features," Apple wrote in a statement.
"We will continue to make in-depth investments in machine learning and artificial intelligence, continuously improve the quality of answers provided by Siri, and further improve the breadth of Siri's answers to questions."
What is certain is that no company can have the perfect digital assistant in science fiction movies, and Apple's products are ahead of Amazon and Google in some fields.
Siri supports 21 languages, while Google Assistant supports 8 languages, and Amazon's Alexa supports only three languages (Google said last month that its Google Assistant will soon support more than 30 languages).
Siri will be used on more than 500 million devices every month, processing about 2 billion requests per week.
is much more responsive than when it was first released, and this is also because it is the voice assistant that comes with the iPhone - iPhone is one of the best-selling products of all time - Apple can indeed confidently say that Siri is the most used digital assistant.
But Siri's capabilities are still limited compared to its competitors. Apple launched SiriKit in 2016, a tool that gives outside developers the opportunity to create new features for Siri. However, this set of tools failed to attract the interest of developers as their creators imagined.
At the same time, Amazon's Alexa has up to 25,000 "skills" built by third-party developers.
A Google spokesperson said Google Assistant has more than 1 million "instructions", including some commands built into the digital assistant, such as navigation through Google Maps, and features built by third parties (Google declined to disclose the number of operations built by third parties).
Competitive platforms are quickly catching up with Apple:
Google claimed in January that 400 million devices were equipped with Google Assistant, and Amazon said it had sold "ten millions" of devices that could enable Alexa during the holidays. (Amazon did not break its Echo sales record.)
"Alexa has been stable since its first day of listing." said a former Siri team member. "For Siri, they almost abandon everything and start again."
Traces in the universe
Siri Company was founded in 2007 and developed based on the development of SRI International (SRI International is a non-profit research group based in Monroe Parker).
was originally founded by Siri to become an intelligent digital assistant that can respond to user requests and interact with users to get the responses needed.
For example, the ideal Siri will not simply provide the user with a restaurant phone number, but will repeatedly communicate with the user to determine details such as date, time, number of people in line - and then make reservations for the user independently.The founders of
Siri believe that the only way to achieve this is to create an open platform that allows external developers to blend with Siri. After doing so, Siri's abilities can go far beyond those built within the team only.
"This is building an AI app store," said one of Siri's initial management staff. "It should be a way to coordinate the network through conversations." Norman Winarsky, founder and one of the company's directors, said that Jobs is a strong supporter of Siri's potential. One day in 2010, Jobs called Siri's CEO Dag Kittlaus and invited three co-founders of the company to their homes, and the meeting lasted for hours.
Jobs eventually convinced the group to ignore all other collaborators and devote themselves to Apple, and Jobs said they will be able to achieve their bigger goals placed on Siri.
Jobs “has greatly inspired this team,” Winarsky said of Siri’s co-founder. "He made the team believe they could leave their own marks in the universe. He made us all believe that."
Apple acquired Siri in April 2010 for more than $200 million. Siri had only 24 employees at the time, but Apple quickly hired more people to form Siri's core team.
18 months later, when Siri and iPhone 4s were launched together, the Siri team had grown to nearly 100 people.
Jobs still maintained a close partnership with the team after the acquisition of Siri, and former members of the team said that Jobs could be seen appearing at the weekly meeting almost every week and commenting on the upcoming features.
Scott Forstall, who was Apple's senior vice president at the time, also supported the Siri team.
Forstall’s extensive portfolio includes Siri’s development and is known for his confrontational approach, but the Siri team recognizes that he has a strong insight into what to do and likes to do it himself.
Former Siri employee said that he tinkers with his skills almost every day, and often said after attending meetings: "I discovered 10 things last night."
To ensure Siri can be released on time, the team made some compromises to the initial idea.
opens products to external developers, that is, the "Artificial Intelligence Application Store" plan, and must be put aside. Jobs hoped that Siri would focus on something that only Apple could fully control, but early Siri team members said that Jobs promised they would build a third-party ecosystem later.
On October 4, 2011, the day after Apple launched Siri, Jobs died of long-term cancer troubles. Members of Siri's team said his death basically marked the destruction of Siri's original team plan.
"Steve died after Siri was launched, and Apple lost its outlook for the future," said the former employee. "They don't have a macro direction."
The beginning of chaos
Forstall is still on the Siri team, but his attention has been distracted by other major projects, such as the upcoming Apple Maps (Apple Maps).
Forstall Appoints Richard Williamson to lead the Siri team in an effort to get everything back on track. Richard is one of his deputy in the Apple Maps project.
Several former employees said Williamson made decisions that many other members of the team opposed, such as planning to upgrade Siri only once a year.
This is the frequency that Apple usually uses in iOS system upgrades, and Williamson's previous job was to adapt the software to the mobile phone system updated from the background server.
team members said they strongly opposed such a pattern on Siri updates, but were ignored. They believe that Siri services need to be continuously upgraded and improved online, rather than just updated annually.
These former employees said that although the team made many stability and performance updates to the server software, there was no architectural change in Siri during the first year.
Williamson wrote in an email responding to the interview invitation that the so-called statement that Siri did not need to be updated continuously was "totally incorrect."
He said that the decision at the "technical direction of software and server infrastructure" was determined by his subordinates, and his responsibility was to make the entire team work.
"After the release, Siri became a disaster," Williamson wrote. "It runs very slowly and the software is full of serious errors. These problems are completely related to Siri's original team, and of course not my problem."
After the release of this statement, Kittlaus responded on Twitter :
"This nonsense statement was made by the head and chief designer of Apple Maps, the biggest release disaster in Apple's history.
In fact, Siri performed well at the release, but, like any new platform, under the unexpected huge data load, Siri needs to adjust the load scale and maintain 24 hours of uninterrupted maintenance."
When Siri When it was first released, the surge in user volume exceeded expectations and the software began to crash.
engineers hastily maintained the backend service to run uninterruptedly, but the software's architecture level does not refactor the processing of large amounts of data inflows at all.
An employee appointed to improve the volatile backend architecture recalled that a Siri task that initially required 500 servers, after improving the code, only 5 servers were needed to complete.
"It's a war," said another former employee.
Luc Julia, who worked at SRI in the 1990s with Siri co-founder Adam Cheyer, was invited to manage the Siri team and provide "experienced leadership".
Several former Siri employees said they had a pleasant experience working under Julia, but Williamson wrote that he had clashes with many people at Apple, including Forstall.
When Forstall pressed Julia to leave, Williamson wrote that he did. Julia left the company in less than a year after operating the Siri team.
Williamson wrote that he tried to get the team to complete SiriKit to allow external developers to improve Siri's capabilities. But the team refused because Siri's "original software is too fragile and too rigid."
The disagreement between Williamson and Siri's team led to the departure of co-founder Cheyer in June 2012, one of the most active supporters to get Siri to reach its potential.
The departure of Cheyer soon led to several founding members of Siri team leaving the project.
Forstall and Williamson also left before the end of that year. Both managers were fired after Apple released the catastrophic Apple map on iOS 6. Former employees of
Siri said they regretted losing Forstall, a great executive who truly believes in these jobs.
turns to search
Shortly after Apple acquired Siri, Jobs gave the public some rare insights in his mind.
"(Siri) has no intention of getting involved in the search field." Jobs said at the Wall Street Journal Tech Conference in June 2010 that
"it belongs to the field of artificial intelligence. We have no plans to start a search business. It's not the field we are familiar with, nor is it a thing we care about. Others are doing well in this field."
Still, high-quality search capabilities are a key factor in creating a useful digital assistant. When users ask questions, AI needs to access the knowledge base and quickly identify the correct answers.
But Jobs made a point that many members of Siri's team have revealed: Siri is more than just search.
A team member said their vision of perfect Siri was similar to the 2013 Spike Jonze’s film She. In this movie, Joaquin Phoenix plays a lonely man in love with "Samantha", an operating system he is familiar with.
- It's a war
Team members with the same vision said they immediately expressed their doubts when they learned that search experts like Stasior were appointed to lead the Siri project.
Stasior received a PhD in Computer Science from MIT and helped found Amazon's search division A9.com. From 2006 to 2012, he served as president and CEO of A9.com. Some of the Siri team employees under
Stasior felt that he lacked background in voice or natural language processing (two other key Siri departments) and had difficulty leading the team successfully.
"I think that although he was very interested in Siri when he came to Apple, his long-term goal was to build a search engine," said a former employee who had worked for a long time under Stasior. "Siri is just a starting point for transforming a search engine."
When Stasior joined Apple, its search engine functions were scattered throughout the company and had a lot of repetitive work.
The people at the time said Stasior's work included integrating all the different resources of Siri and Apple's existing search capabilities to improve Siri's core performance. He also manages Apple's work in supporting the development of search technology, including web search, media search and Wikipedia data sorting.
"His job is to turn search into a core asset in Apple and make it reach the world's top level," said an employee who once worked on the search team at Stasior.
Stasior leads a series of acquisitions to support Apple's internal search talent and technology development.
In October 2013, the team spent more than $40 million to acquire Cue, the startup has built a personal assistant app that can generate personal schedules by searching for users’ emails, according to a report provided by TechCrunch.
In 2013, Stasior acquired Topsy for more than $200 million, another large acquisition of his. Topsy's technology is used in Spotlight, a search feature built into Apple's macOS and iOS operating systems launched in 2004.
"Once Bill finds something good, he can freely pounce on it." An Apple employee who conducted due diligence for the acquisition said. "Their goal is to acquire and consolidate as much of the outstanding search talents as possible under Bill."
A former employee said the Topsy team eventually grew into a huge organization under Stasior, and now almost equals the number of employees on the Siri team. Topsy's CEO Vipul Ved Prakash continues to lead the search team and report directly to Stasior.
However, it is quite troublesome to unite the existing Siri team with the search team that continues to expand under Stasior’s leadership. Members of the
Topsy team said they were reluctant to work with the Siri team, who believed that the Siri team's work was slow and fell into the quagmire of initial architecture design, which has been continuously updated since its launch, but has never been completely replaced.
"We think, 'Why don't you start building what we need again and then think about the coordination between the two?" said a former member of the search team. "But they still focus on coordination issues." The former employee of
said that the core functionality of Siri and Spotlight is a combination of Topsy's technology and Siri data services, based on the previous generation of search technology ported on iTunes search and modified for Siri in 2013.
Siri data service involves Wikipedia, stocks and movie screening times, while Topsy is classified by Twitter, news and web search results.
Under the plan of Prakash to integrate all the technologies into a separate stack, the Siri data services team was eventually integrated into the Topsy team. But they are based on two different programming languages and are difficult to coordinate.
Ultimately, the difficulty of integrating the search team led to some embarrassing results.Users ask the same question to Siri or spotlight but get completely different answers, after all, this is based on two different search techniques built by two different teams.
internal affairs, and foreign affairs have started to be
Siri's technology involves natural language processing, which is related to understanding the user's intentions.
In terms of speech processing, Apple initially chose to outsource, using the spoken word detection software of Boston company Nuance. Later, under the leadership of Stasior, Apple began to build its own voice recognition software.
In 2013, Apple hired Alex Acero, an experienced voice recognition expert from , Microsoft , to lead the new team's voice recognition project. This project aims to combine the latest voice recognition technology with the company’s core Siri technology to improve Siri’s conversational capabilities.
Siri team believes this combination is a wise move and can bring significant improvements to Siri.
In the same year, Apple also acquired voice startup Novauris Technologies to accumulate its professional knowledge in the field of voice.
At the end of 2014, that is, after working together for 6 months, the newly formed team was divided into two parts.
voice recognition team is still led by Acero, while the natural language team is led by Anoop Sinha, who was a former management consultant at McKinsey.
Media The Information learned from former Apple employees that they had not been told the reasons for the team before, but only knew that things had come to this point, so Sinha had its own territory.
And several members of Siri's team immediately became disgusted with Sinha because the latter did not have a background in natural language processing.
A former employee said Sinha’s decisions seemed to be driven by office politics rather than science and technology.
A former employee recalled the meeting that the gunpowder between Sinha and Acero was full of gunpowder, and the two sides had argued over project allocation at the meeting, which forced Stasior to make a final ruling.
Tensions between factions sparked another wave of employee departures, including the departure of experienced phonologists Gokhan Tur, Chuck Wooters, Tom Kollar and Larry Gillick.
In 2016, Sinha left the company and is now an engineering manager for Facebook (information comes from his LinkedIn profile). He did not respond to a request for comment.
Some Siri employees also switched to a new company co-founded by Kittlaus and Cheyer, called Viv Labs. The company aims to continue to build better digital assistants.
Stasior was not very happy and angry about this, "Are these unreliable people worth believing?" a former employee retelled.
According to the then Siri employee, Stasior later learned that Kittlaus and Cheyer, who had newly established their own companies, would also go to the Apple campus to play basketball with their former Siri colleagues, and he was worried that the other party's move was to poach. So soon after, the two of them were pulled onto the Apple Park blacklist.
The strong emergence of competitors
In order to make Siri stronger, Stasior continues to implement a large-scale acquisition strategy.
In October 2015, he led the purchase of VocalIQ, a British artificial intelligence startup that is dedicated to the research of dynamic learning systems.
A former VocalIQ employee said the company's team regards Siri as a "manually operated system" and believes that its technology can help Siri get further improvements.
VocalIQ's technology mainly uses the intake and analysis of data from sound interactions, and continuously adjusts the accuracy of the learning system.
According to relevant people familiar with the matter, Apple has successfully integrated VocalIQ technology into Siri's calendar function.
In addition, Apple has introduced more automated machine learning technologies in its natural language processing systems.
Former employee Rushin Shah led the team to integrate more automated machine learning technologies into Siri's domain selection (such as determining whether it is an information sending request or an information sharing request), as well as an understanding of the intention of a specific domain name.
In 2017, Shah left Apple and, according to his LinkedIn profile, he is currently a senior manager of Facebook’s natural language understanding team.
At the same time, Apple gave its three-year lead in the field of digital assistants to Amazon and Google .
An article published by the Wall Street Journal in June 2017 predicted that HomePod "at best, it will squeeze into the third place in the home speaker market."
So, how will Apple, caught off guard, deal with these competitors? Two members of the
Siri team told The Information that until 2015, or after the Echo was born at the end of 2014, their teams still didn't know about Apple's HomePod project.
According to a source, one of Apple's initial plans was to launch a speaker without Siri. The sudden addition of Siri feature of
has caused Apple's Siri voice recognition team to be in a busy weekly meeting with Beats, an audio product company that Apple acquired for $3 billion.
There were about 25 employees participating in the early regular meetings, including several Beats employees, and participated in the discussion via video. The news comes from Chuck Wooters, a former Apple voice recognition employee who participated in the regular meeting. The research direction of the
Beats team is microphone noise reduction and beamforming algorithms, striving to better receive user voice commands.
In this way, Apple collects data by installing microphones in apartments around the Bay Area, and at the same time reproduces the home use scenario. Wooters said the team called the data it collected "room impulse response."
In fact, Siri's most significant failure is that it still lacks a third-party developer ecosystem, which is seen as a key element of the original version of Siri.
According to former employees who have been involved in several Apple's developer tool projects, after shelving the project for many years, Apple took back its energy in other areas and eventually launched SiriKit in 2016.
Several other employees said that Apple has been developing toolkits since 2012.
Apple eventually appointed Vineet Khosla to take charge of the work, one of the employees of Siri's founding team.
Apple wants developers to connect apps with Siri, and it seems that they are ready to strengthen the performance of their digital assistants, rather than relying on a limited set of local apps to make calls or text messages.
However, SiriKit has not yet fulfilled its promise. So far, it only covers 10 features such as payment, booking a ride, setting up a to-do list and viewing photos, among others.
Several senior engineers who have participated in SiriKit development have left their jobs or left the project. According to some insiders, Khosla is no longer in charge of the SiriKir project, but he has not left Apple, and his successor is Robby Walker, current director of Siri.
former Siri member pointed out that Apple is trying to transform itself into a service company under numerous challenges, but its business core is still product design.
company intends to create a flawless online service, but this belief is not as strong as the desire to design a transformative hardware product. This situation has led to many problems with the complex projects led by Stasior.
"Apple's ecosystem and the efforts made by the team are uncommon." A former Siri employee said, "I think the one thing Bill has to work hard to solve is to fight this kind of idea."
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