Siri is under new leadership at Apple, with Mike Rockwell taking on managerial responsibility under Craig Federighi’s oversight. Rockwell may seem like an odd choice considering his history leading Vision Pro and visionOS development, but per multiple reports his passion to fix Siri has been growing for years.
Mike Rockwell‘s reported history of Siri frustration
Recently when Mark Gurman broke the news that Rockwell would be tasked with leading Siri, he wrote:
Inside Apple, Rockwell hasn’t been shy about criticizing Siri, according to people familiar with the matter. For years, he has pitched senior vice presidents on ideas for overhauling the voice assistant to make it more personalized. He has also been advising the AI group in recent weeks. Even before the management changes, Giannandrea long considered Rockwell a potential successor.
Similarly, Gurman adds:
When developing the Vision Pro, Rockwell believed that Siri could be a central way to control the $3,499 device. Now, it’s only a limited element, with the company primarily focusing on hand-and-eye control.
This corroborates a two-year-old report that mentioned Rockwell and his team “expressed disappointment in the demonstrations the Siri team created to showcase how the voice assistant could control [Vision Pro]”.
My big takeaway from these reports?
Mike Rockwell has wanted to fix Siri for years, and that kind of passion was clearly absent with prior leadership.
It’s also exactly what Siri needs.
Siri’s long era of slow change could finally be over
I’ve followed Apple closely for a long time, including back in 2011 when the company wowed everyone with its very first Siri demonstration.
Even from the beginning, though, Siri has struggled to live up to its potential.
And sadly, from the outside at least, it’s seemed like Apple has been okay with that.
When Alexa debuted alongside the Amazon Echo, it didn’t seem to do much to motivate Siri’s team. Do you remember how long it took for Siri to support multiple timers?
Years passed, and more recently ChatGPT launched. OpenAI’s technology is clearly of a new breed of intelligence that Siri falls far short of.
Yet again, from the outside at least, Apple’s approach to Siri has been steady.
Even as competitors launched big threats, Apple has slowly made small Siri refinements—like being more forgiving when a user misspeaks—rather than offering a truly next-gen assistant.
But Mike Rockwell, it seems, “thinks different.”
Just in the short time he’s been in charge, Rockwell has reportedly instituted big structural overhauls to Siri’s internal teams, and a significant policy change.
Also, per reporting from The New York Times, Siri’s three major AI upgrades will launch this fall with iOS 19. When Apple first delayed them, its language implied we’d be waiting until 2026.
These are encouraging signs for Siri’s future. But what makes me even more optimistic is Rockwell’s apparent passion to make Siri great.
He clearly sees what the issues are, and is determined to fix them.
That kind of Siri leadership, in my view at least, has been missing from Apple for a long time.
And here’s hoping that kind of leadership will propel Siri to new heights in the years ahead.
How do you feel about Mike Rockwell being chosen as Siri’s new leader? Let us know in the comments.
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