@gruber

“Hundreds of employees working on Blackbird were assigned to ‌Siri‌ X, which killed the ambitious project to make ‌Siri‌ more capable. ‌Siri‌ X was mostly completed in 2021 and now many of the voice assistant's functions are processed locally.”

Sorry for the spam but I don’t know why more people aren’t talking about this report! A light weight Siri is exactly what you were talking about by things starting simple.

The engineers who bet on Siri X are at the root of Siri rot.

@gruber

“Blackbird competed with the work of two senior leaders on the ‌Siri‌ team who were responsible for helping ‌Siri‌ understand and respond to queries. These individuals pushed for their own project, codenamed "‌Siri‌ X," for the 10th anniversary of the virtual assistant. The project simply aimed to move ‌Siri‌'s processing on-device for privacy reasons, without the lightweight, modular functionality of Blackbird.”

They had the right strategy originally and they picked the wrong one!

@gruber

Here’s the interesting part John

In 2019, the ‌Siri‌ team explored a project to rewrite the virtual assistant from scratch, codenamed "Blackbird." The effort sought to create a lightweight version of ‌Siri‌ that would delegate the creation of functions to app developers and would run on iPhones instead of the cloud to improve performance and privacy. Demos of Blackbird apparently prompted excitement among Apple employees owing to its utility and responsiveness.

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@gruber

“Former Apple employees who worked in the company's AI and machine learning groups believe that a lack of ambition and organizational dysfunction have hindered ‌Siri‌ and the company's AI technologies. Apple's virtual assistant is apparently "widely derided" inside the company for its lack of functionality and minimal improvement over time.”

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