Tim Cook addresses Apple’s delay of personalized Siri features – 9to5Mac

During today’s earnings call with analysts, Apple CEO Tim Cook addressed the company’s delay of its more personal Siri features that were announced as part of Apple Intelligence last year. Cook assured analysts that the company is “making progress” on shipping these features to consumers…

Here’s Cook’s full quote from today’s earnings on the current state of Apple Intelligence:

Since we launched iOS 18, we’ve released a number of Apple Intelligence features, from helpful Writing Tools to Genmoji, Image Playground, Image Wand, Clean Up, Visual Intelligence, and a seamless connection to ChatGPT. We made it possible for users to create movies of their memories with a simple prompt and added AI-powered photo search, smart replies, priority summaries for Mail, Messages, and more. We’ve also expanded these capabilities to more languages and regions.

With regard to the more personal Siri features we announced, we need more time to complete our work on these features so they meet our high-quality bar. We are making progress, and we look forward to getting these features into customers’ hands.

Later in the call, Cook and CFO Kevan Parekh were asked directly about the Apple Intelligence delays by Richard Kramer of Arete Research. Here’s the full interaction:

Kramer: Given your recognition that the new Siri assistant is taking longer than you thought to deliver, I’d like to go back to my question from the last call and ask about what some of the learnings you had from those delays and whether you attribute them to organizational factors, to your legacy software stack, or is it a matter of R&D spending? What are some of the key gating factors investors should look for, either at WWDC or beyond, to have a sense that Apple can deliver on some of the promises of the announcements at the prior WWDC?

Cook: If you sort of step back from what we said at WWDC, we talked about a number of different features that would launch with iOS 18, and we’ve released a slew of those, from Writing Tools to seamlessly connecting to ChatGPT, to Genmoji, to Image Playground, to Image Wand, to Clean Up, Visual Intelligence, making movies of your memories with a simple prompt, AI-powered photo search, smart replies, priority notifications, and the list goes on. And so, we’ve delivered a lot. And so, we’ve just recently, a few weeks ago, expanded it into several different languages, including French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, as well as localized English for both Singapore and India.

So we’ve delivered a lot.

However, with regard to the more personal Siri, as you mentioned, we just need more time to complete the work so they meet our high-quality bar. There’s not a lot of other reason for it. It’s just taking a bit longer than we thought, but we are making progress and we’re extremely excited to get the more personal Siri features out there.

Parekh: I’ll just add that on your question about investment, that we don’t underinvest in our business. You know, we make significant investments in R&D. That continues to grow. We’re continuing to grow our R&D investment, and so we definitely are making all the investments we think we need to enable our roadmap.

This marks the first time that Apple has publicly addressed the more personal Siri features since announcing the delay in March. The company has not provided a specific timeline on when the features will ship, other than saying they will be available “in the coming year.”

The more personal version of Siri is set to include features like personal context, in-app actions, and on-screen awareness.

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