Siri’s new boss is already making big internal changes, per report

Apple recently gave Mike Rockwell leadership over Siri, a big shake-up that proved the status quo of Siri development had grown unacceptable to senior leaders. Now, per a new report, it seems Rockwell is wasting no time continuing to implement major changes internally with the teams responsible for Siri.

Mike Rockwell revamping Siri team with various personnel and structural shifts

Mark Gurman writes at Bloomberg:

Apple Inc.’s new Siri engineering chief is overhauling the management team leading development of the beleaguered voice assistant, taking a step he assured employees would set the company up for success.

Mike Rockwell, head of engineering for the assistant, is replacing much of Siri’s leadership with lieutenants from his Vision Pro software group, according to people with knowledge of the matter. He’s also restructuring teams related to speech, understanding, performance and user experience, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the changes are private.

The full report goes into a lot more detail on the specific managerial and structural changes Siri’s teams are undergoing.

Some of those changes include:

• “Ranjit Desai, a longtime top deputy from the development of the Vision Pro…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”
• ”Stuart Bowers, who has led data, training and evaluation teams, will get an expanded role working on Siri’s ability to figure out how to respond to a user”
• ”David Winarsky, a longtime Siri leader, is taking over a new group responsible for all voice and speech-related components.”

Gurman summarizes the changes:

The moves show that Rockwell is either demoting or replacing the prior managers in charge of Siri engineering. At the same time, he is turning to the people behind the Vision Pro to fix the long-plagued voice assistant.

9to5Mac’s Take

This isn’t the first we’ve heard of big changes happening under Siri’s new leadership. A recent report indicated the teams working on Siri features were being permitted to use third-party LLMs in features for the first time. Rockwell may very well have been behind that change too, though the report credited it to Federighi.

One thing is clear: Siri’s new boss is taking decisive action to right the ship of Siri’s years of stagnation. And that sounds like very good news for users.

What do you make of this new report on Siri changes? Let us know in the comments.

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