On Thursday, Bloomberg reported that Apple CEO Tim Cook had “lost confidence” in SVP of AI John Giannandrea. In turn, he’ll no longer be in charge of Siri product development, and now Vision Pro head Mike Rockwell will be taking the lead.
While pretty much any news for Siri would be good news at this point, I’m optimistic in Mike Rockwell’s ability to turn Siri around. I’ll explain.
Rockwell’s past Siri relationship
Despite not having an AI background, Mike Rockwell seems to have a strong sense of product, and he certainly isn’t scared of saying what needs to be said.
Prior to the debut of Apple Intelligence, Mike Rockwell believed that voice control could be a critical input method for Apple Vision Pro. Despite this belief, he didn’t have much faith in Siri, and even wanted to build an alternative assistant, per a report from The Information:
For example, the team building Apple’s mixed-reality headset, including its leader Mike Rockwell, has expressed disappointment in the demonstrations the Siri team created to showcase how the voice assistant could control the headset, according to two people familiar with the matter. At one point, Rockwell’s team considered building alternative methods for controlling the device using voice commands, the people said (the headset team ultimately ditched that idea).
In the end, the teams did not end up building an alternative voice assistant. However, it serves as a point of reference for how Rockwell felt about Siri.
Bloomberg additionally reported that Rockwell “hasn’t been shy” when it came to criticizing Siri, and had been pitching new Siri ideas “for years.”
Rockwell’s new Siri leadership
Personally, I feel that Rockwell and his teams laid a very strong foundation for Apple Vision Pro. Sure, the hardware is a bit expensive, but I can see a clear path forward for it. Siri, on the other hand, clearly hasn’t had the best leadership. Anything would be an improvement, but Rockwell gives me a specific kind of hope.
Furthermore, under Giannandrea’s leadership, Siri Director Robby Walker had compared Apple’s latest Siri efforts to setting a world record. A puzzling comparison, to say the least:
Walker compared the endeavor to an attempt to swim to Hawaii. “We swam hundreds of miles — we set a Guinness Book for World Records for swimming distance — but we still didn’t swim to Hawaii,” he said. “And we were being jumped on, not for the amazing swimming that we did, but the fact that we didn’t get to the destination.”
One could argue that this was just an encouraging comment for employees. Nonetheless, comparing new Siri features (or rather, the lack thereof) to a setting a “Guinness Book for World Records” is certainly… a choice. Apple was already plenty late to the AI race, and pretending to have set a world record when there’s been nothing but delays isn’t the type of leadership that’ll make Siri great.
Rockwell is certainly being handed a dumpster fire, so I don’t expect his new role to necessarily be easy. Hopefully there’ll be a more positive Siri story to share by WWDC25.
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