Apple hires new leader to boost Siri and AI

Apple

Apple is shaking things up inside its company to make Siri and its AI better, according to Bloomberg. They’ve brought in Kim Vorrath, who has been with Apple for 37 years, to lead the AI team under John Giannandrea, who is in charge of AI at Apple.

Vorrath has a knack for managing big software projects and keeping everything on track. She’s known as Apple’s “bug fixer” and has been a big influence in the company. Before this new role, she was part of the team working on Apple’s AR/VR headset, the Vision Pro.

This change comes right after lots of talk about how Siri didn’t do well when asked about Super Bowl scores. For a while now, Siri hasn’t been as good as other voice helpers, especially when compared to new AI chatbots.

Apple has also been dealing with complaints about how its Apple Intelligence summarizes news, sometimes getting things wrong and confusing people. To tackle this, they’re planning to stop these summaries for news and entertainment apps in the next update, iOS 18.3, which should come out soon.

Despite trying to make Siri better by adding ChatGPT from OpenAI, there are still issues. But Apple is working on it, with plans for more Siri improvements in the iOS 18.4 update and even bigger changes in iOS 19, where they might make Siri like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.

Moving Vorrath to the AI team shows that Apple thinks AI is more crucial than their work on Vision Pro. She’s good at organizing tech teams and making their work better. In a note about the change, Giannandrea mentioned that they want to focus on making Siri work better and improving Apple’s own AI systems.