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Apple’s new Siri chief restructures teams responsible beleaguered digital assistant

MacDailyNews

Apr 22

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Apple’s new Siri engineering chief, Mike Rockwell, is revamping the leadership team behind the beleaguered digital assistant, Mark Gurman reports for Bloomberg News citing “people with knowledge of the matter.” Rockwell, who led Apple’s Vision Products Group, which developed the Apple Vision Pro, is replacing much of Siri’s management with trusted lieutenants from his former group. Additionally, he’s reorganizing teams focused on speech, comprehension, performance, and user experience, according to insiders. These changes aim to streamline development and enhance the capabilities of Apple’s long-neglected Siri digital assistant.

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Rockwell was named head of Siri engineering last month in a management shake-up that involved stripping away some responsibilities from AI chief John Giannandrea and former Siri head Robby Walker. The move followed project delays and engineering snags, prompting Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook to seek new leadership.
Fixing Siri has become one of the highest-profile challenges at Apple, which first unveiled the voice assistant in 2011. The technology has fallen behind that of rivals like Alphabet Inc.’s Google and OpenAI — and it’s come to represent Apple’s struggles to find its footing in the fast-growing artificial intelligence field.
In one of Rockwell’s first moves, he enlisted Ranjit Desai, a longtime top deputy from the development of the Vision Pro. Desai will now be in charge of much of Siri’s engineering, including the underlying platform and systems groups… Olivier Gutknecht, a senior Vision Pro software executive, is taking over the team in charge of Siri’s user experience. Nate Begeman and Tom Duffy, veteran Apple software engineering managers, are also joining the Siri team to run underlying architecture…
Apple’s artificial intelligence and machine learning team — mocked as “AI/MLess” by some employees — had been struggling for months with management issues, philosophical disagreements and execution problems.

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MacDailyNews Take: With Siri now basically holding a full house of negative associations built up over years of neglect, incompetence, and empty promises, perhaps, if Apple actually manages to fix Siri this time around (a big IF; we’ve heard it all before), a rebrand might be useful. Kill off Siri and introduce something new – since it will actually finally be new – in order to allow it to take off on its own without the weighty baggage of the Siri name.

I bought a new iPhone for Siri with Apple Intelligence and all I got was this lousy glow. pic.twitter.com/I0G4Wxf5Im
— MacDailyNews (@MacDailyNews) March 25, 2025

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