Apple is making an internal staffing change that it hopes will improve Siri and its artificial intelligence offerings, reports Bloomberg. Kim Vorrath, a 37-year Apple veteran, will join the AI team to work under AI chief John Giannandrea.


Vorrath is a program management VP, and has a reputation for meticulously managing software projects at Apple and ensuring employees meet deadlines. She has been described as Apple's "bug wrangler" and as a "powerful force" in the company. For the last few years, she has been working on Apple's AR/VR team developing the Vision Pro headset, but now she is being moved to AI.

The news comes just after a widely circulated story about Siri's failure to accurately provide basic knowledge about Super Bowl results. ‌Siri‌ has long been seen as inferior to other personal assistants, and in recent years, ‌Siri‌ has been unable to measure up to AI-based chatbots.

Apple is also addressing widespread criticism of its Apple Intelligence Notification summary feature, which has on several occasions mistakenly summarized news stories in a way that produced confusing false headlines. To fix the problem, Apple is temporarily removing Notification summaries for news and entertainment apps in iOS 18.3, an update expected next week.

Apple attempted to improve ‌Siri‌ by integrating OpenAI's ChatGPT into ‌Apple Intelligence‌, but there are still serious problems with ‌Siri‌. Additional ‌Siri‌ features are going to be coming in the near future as part of an iOS 18.4 update, and in iOS 19, Apple is rumored to be planning to introduce an LLM version of ‌Siri‌ that will be comparable to ChatGPT and Google's Gemini.

According to Bloomberg, Vorrath's move to the AI team is a signal that the company sees AI as more important than the Vision Pro. Vorrath is known for organizing engineering groups and redesigning workflows with new processes.

In a memo announcing the change, Giannandrea said that Apple plans to focus on improving the ‌Siri‌ infrastructure as well as Apple's in-house AI models.
This article, "Apple Brings in New Exec to 'Fix' Siri and Apple Intelligence" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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Siri en prend (encore) pour son grade : John Gruber a récemment qualifié l’assistant vocal d’Apple de « blague pas drôle » après que ce dernier ait échoué à donner le gagnant du Super Bowl 13. Cette critique fait suite à un test plus large mené par Paul Kafasis, qui a évalué la capacité de […]

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L’article Siri échoue lamentablement à un test de connaissance sur le Super Bowl et la NFL est apparu en premier sur iPhoneAddict.fr.

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Siri en prend (encore) pour son grade : John Gruber a récemment qualifié l’assistant vocal d’Apple de « blague pas drôle » après que ce dernier ait échoué à donner le gagnant du Super Bowl 13. Cette critique fait suite à un test plus large mené par Paul Kafasis, qui a évalué la capacité de […]

Lire la suite...

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L’article Siri échoue lamentablement à un test de connaissance sur le Super Bowl et la NFL est apparu en premier sur iPhoneAddict.fr.

In what may not come as much of a surprise, a new test of Siri's knowledge of Super Bowl history has revealed significant accuracy issues with Apple's virtual assistant, suggesting Apple still has some way to go in overcoming challenges with Siri's ability to provide reliable information.


In a methodical experiment, One Foot Tsunami's Paul Kafasis asked Siri who won each Super Bowl from I through LX and documented its responses. The results were strikingly poor, with Siri correctly identifying winners only 34% of the time – just 20 correct answers out of 58 played Super Bowls.

Perhaps most notably, Siri repeatedly and incorrectly credited the Philadelphia Eagles with 33 Super Bowl victories, despite the team having won only one championship in their history. The virtual assistant's responses ranged from providing information about wrong Super Bowls to offering completely unrelated football facts.

While Siri did manage a few streaks of accurate answers, including three consecutive correct responses for Super Bowls V through VII, it also had a remarkable string of 15 consecutive incorrect answers spanning Super Bowls XVII through XXXII.

In one telling instance, when asked about Super Bowl XVI, Siri offered to defer to ChatGPT - which then provided the correct answer. The contrast highlighted the limitations of Siri's own knowledge base compared to more advanced AI systems.

The test was conducted on iOS 18.2.1 with Apple Intelligence enabled, and similar results were found on both the upcoming iOS 18.3 beta and macOS 14.7.2, suggesting the issue extends across Apple's platforms. Kafasis generated a spreadsheet of the results in both Excel and PDF formats, which you can read here.

Separately, inspired by Kafasis' test, Daring Fireball's John Gruber tried some of his own sports queries with Siri and compared its responses to ChatGPT, Kagi, DuckDuckGo, and Google, all of which succeeded where Siri failed.

Perhaps worse for Apple, Gruber found that old Siri (i.e. before Apple Intelligence) did a better job at answering a question by declining to answer it, instead providing a list of web links. The first web result provided an accurate, if only partial, answer to the question, whereas new Siri, powered by Apple Intelligence, fared much worse. Gruber explains:

New Siri — powered by Apple Intelligence™ with ChatGPT integration enabled — gets the answer completely but plausibly wrong, which is the worst way to get it wrong. It's also inconsistently wrong — I tried the same question four times, and got a different answer, all of them wrong, each time. It's a complete failure.

"It's just incredible how stupid Siri is about a subject matter of such popularity," commented Gruber. "If you had guessed that Siri could get half the Super Bowls right, you lost, and it wasn't even that close."

Of course, this isn't the first time Siri has received heavy flak for its all-round performance, but Gruber's criticism about "plausibly wrong" answers to general knowledge questions ties back to the modern problem of hallucinating AI chatbots that spout misleading or flat-out wrong responses with complete confidence.

Apple is developing a much smarter version of Siri that utilizes advanced large language models, which should allow the personal assistant to better compete with chatbots like ChatGPT. A chatbot version of Siri would likely be able to hold ongoing conversations and provide the sort of help and insight as ChatGPT or Claude, but how well the integration will perform may be a concern, going on Siri's abysmal track record.

Apple is expected to announce LLM Siri as soon as 2025 at WWDC, but Apple won't launch it until several months after it's unveiled. That means LLM Siri would come in an update to iOS 19, with Apple planning for a spring 2026 launch.
This article, "Siri Gives Eagles 33 False Super Bowl Wins in Basic Knowledge Test" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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