As part of its broader effort to improve its AI offerings, Apple is reportedly putting together an “Answers, Knowledge, and Information” team tasked with improving the Siri user experience.
Originally brought to light by Bloomberg, Apple’s goal for Siri is to provide users with a more conversational experience while also improving Siri’s ability to handle general knowledge questions. Apple’s current plan is to develop an “answer engine” capable of scouring the web for pertinent and accurate answers to user queries. This development is certainly welcome news to folks who have been frustrated with Siri’s ability to quickly and accurately answer even simple questions.
Of particular interest is that Apple’s AI improvements may not just appear in Siri, but in a separate chatbot app as well. “A standalone app is currently under exploration,” the report notes, “alongside new back-end infrastructure meant to power search capabilities in future versions of Siri, Spotlight and Safari.”
Apple believes it can fix its AI mistakes
Apple isn’t currently a major player in the AI space, but recent comments from Tim Cook underscore the company’s confidence that this can change. During a recent internal meeting, Tim Cook said that Apple doesn’t pride itself on being first to market, but rather the best. To this point, recall that Apple wasn’t a first mover in either the MP3 player or smartphone market, but eventually came to dominate them both with the iPod and iPhone, respectively. Therefore, Cook believes Apple can do the same with AI. Cook also stressed that Apple is taking AI incredibly seriously and that it’s also open to making strategic acquisitions to “accelerate our roadmap.”
You might also recall rumblings that Apple was interested in acquiring Perplexity AI. While such an acquisition would immediately bolster Apple’s position in the industry, Perplexity’s recent valuation at $18 billion makes an outright acquisition somewhat unlikely. While companies like Meta aren’t afraid to throw around huge sums of cash for acquisitions, Apple has historically been much more frugal. Indeed, Apple’s most expensive acquisition to date was when it purchased Beats for $3 billion in 2014.
Apple is already hiring new AI engineers
Apple over the past two weeks alone has added dozens of new job listings for experienced AI researchers and engineers to join the Siri team. For instance, one listing from July 24 seeks a Senior Machine Learning Engineer with deep LLM expertise to help Apple develop “state-of-the-art generative AI technology.”
Apple’s effort to solidify its Siri team with top talent comes at a crucial time. Over the last few weeks, Apple lost some of its more distinguished AI engineers to rival companies. For instance, Ruoming Pang recently left Apple to join Meta after being offered a $200 million compensation package. Pang will be especially tough to replace, as he was responsible for developing the foundational models that underpin Apple Intelligence. He was also in charge of Apple’s Foundational Model team.
For now, Apple’s nascent “Answers, Knowledge, and Information” team is under the direction of Robby Walker. Walker, if you recall, labeled Apple’s slow progress with Siri “ugly” and “embarrassing.”
