Siri Team Didn't Learn About HomePod Until 2015, After Amazon Echo Debuted (9to5mac.com)

The Information (paywalled) has published a lengthy report today covering the development of Siri. The article documents Siri's tumultuous changes in leadership and management over the last few years, indicating that Siri 1.0's infrastructure was very creaky, which held back the service. From a report: One of the most interesting anecdotes is the claim that Apple's HomePod team didn't meet with the Siri group until 2015 (Amazon Echo debuted in late 2014). The story says Apple had originally considered launching the speaker without Siri. The big takeaway from The Information's reporting is that Siri launched with a poorly scalable infrastructure that caused bottlenecks for years after it launched in 2011. At the initial release, the popularity of Siri 'exceeded expectations' and led to a lot of unreliability. The backend was not designed to handle enough users. Apple has spent the intervening years modernising the system apparently.

Comments

Not surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

For all Apple's strengths in consumer electronics, they're not great at infrastructure. My experience as a third party, working with their service teams suggests that they are both lacking in serious infrastructure software and services design chops, but at the same time being so incredibly arrogant that they won't take outside advice. Most of the cloud/service companies out there are far more capable. They need to hire out of Google and Facebook more - not at the eng levels, but at the management and leadership levels on their services infrastructure.

Re:Not surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

Nearly exactly what I was going to post. Apple can make a nice looking device for an individual to use at the individual level. They can't make anything that works together well and are completely incapable of making anything that works on a large scale without outside help. Apple's "cloud", quite frankly never worked at all until it was taken over by AWS and Google. A geeky high schooler could put together a more robust infrastructure than Apple is capable of.

Re: Not surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, well users donâ(TM)t care how hard syncing conten can be. They care how hard their device is to use. Failure rate for Siri, while high compared to the competitionâ(TM)s digital assistants, is no where near the failure rates of android and windows devices of which inexperienced people did poorly understood things.

Re:Not surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

Also one of the problems with being first to market. You're tied to mistakes that were, at the time, unforeseeable.

Amazon created a market Apple didn't anticipate. Apple makes phones and premium computers, mostly. The focused mostly on that. I'd bet "putting siri in a speaker" is a lot more complex than it appears to be at first glance.

Where Amazon is hitting it out of the park is their open development resources and willingness to let anyone hook to their platform. Apple and Google (more apple) have fallen in to the trap of crippling their platforms so they can favor their own content stores and services.

I disagree

[SuperKendall]

For all Apple's strengths in consumer electronics, they're not great at infrastructure

That's true in some cases but definitely not all.

iTunes, for example, has been pretty reliable as far as delivering music. Same for the App Store, which has worked extremely well in delivering a high volume of apps for years.

iCloud used to be bad, but actually has been really stable and performed well for at least the past year or so. Siri since launch may have had trouble answering some questions at first but was pretty reliable about delivering some response almost all the time.

One huge win has been push notifications where the Apple infrastructure has been SUPER reliable and could handle a ton of traffic pretty much from day one.

So I'm not sure which teams you have worked with, but Apple does have very good infrastructure teams. Just like with any company though, not EVERY team is going to have amazing and super-competent people working on it...

Re: I disagree

[Anonymous Coward]

You have 200 billion from milking your customers.

We've all heard the horror stories of being unable to update come update day. You'd think a tightly controlled environment with precise numbers you'd provision a bunch of servers to handle the expected numbers.

I mean, are you listening to yourself? You disagree with the op saying their infrastructure could be better, then defended appl's shitty infrastructure. Lol

Re:I disagree

[nadass]

@SuperKendall, there's so much more to infrastructure than the few consumer services you personally use... and you've actually argued in support of the weak-infrastructure opinions. iTunes was announced in 2001, iCloud launched in 2011. For iTunes to finally be perceived as "stable" only very recently (but they still have scalability issues with iOS updates) and for iCloud to be "really stable and performed well for at least the past year" means they've both been struggling with infrastructure for longer than they've been stable.

Funny enough, iCloud infrastructure is outsourced to AWS and Azure (and Google Cloud now) so that explains its own stability. But Apple has an infrastructure partnership with IBM that's supposed to make everything Apple amazing, especially inside the mothership. Time will tell whether that ever translates to improved performance for all of us consumers.

Re:I disagree

[Anonymous Coward]

apples software has always been third rate at best. Maybe lower.

Re: I disagree

[WarJolt]

Simple scales. Apple's cloud is not simple. Amazon already figured out that formula. Most tech companies think they can take legacy solutions and throw money at it to make them scale.

Re:I disagree

[Anonymous Coward]

iTunes and by extension Apple Music is shoddy as fuck. I want to like it, but it's just annoying.

Re:I disagree

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever used Logic Pro? Final Cut Pro? To call those third rate is absolutely ignorant. Apple's software isn't always the greatest, no argument there...but to lump it all together is, again, ignorant.

Re:I disagree

[geirlk]

iCloud used to be bad, but actually has been really stable and performed well for at least the past year or so.

Not very surprising, considering: https://www.theverge.com/2018/...

Style over Substance

[SeaFox]

...indicating that Siri 1.0's infrastructure was very creaky, which held back the service.

It's not Apple's fault. They did the best with the resources the then second most valuable company in the world could do. /s

It's all smoke and mirrors, folks

[Anonymous Coward]

For those of you who work in a corporation, just imagine how incompetent your own projects are, and then realize that no other corporation is really any different.

that's the reason...

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty much that's the explanation why Alexa is in such a good mood lately. I thought it was being creepy... It's just laughing of Apple.

Siri, tell me about the competition.

[forkfail]

Siri, tell me about the competition.

We are Apple. We have no competition.

Siri, search the web for Alexa.

Alexa is a feeble Walmart product written in COBOL, and is no threat.

Siri, are there any plans for you to inhabit any other devices?

I am happy to be part of the best phone ever built. There can be no other home for me.

If Siri wasn't a surveillance app...

[Excelcia]

If Siri's purpose was as an assistant app, and not (as it actually is) a surveillance proof of concept, it wouldn't have these problems. You can't convince me that Apple, or any of the voice recognition players, are dedicating more processing power in their central servers on a per usage-basis than the mobile devices have natively inside them. Apple phones are a multi-gigahertz computing devices with more DSP power inside them than your PC has. The "record-voice and phone home with it so servers can process it" architecture is a not-even-thinly veiled surveillance tactic. Security experts, reputable ones, have been warning people about this for years. Siri was nothing more than a proof of concept for this.

It's really no surprise that the infrastructure couldn't handle it. It's the wrong solution for the problem. The correct solution, though, wouldn't advance their goal.

Re:If Siri wasn't a surveillance app...

[ShanghaiBill]

Apple phones are a multi-gigahertz computing devices with more DSP power inside them than your PC has.

Except for a tiny bit of initial processing, modern voice recognition doesn't use DSPs. It uses GPUs.

Re:If Siri wasn't a surveillance app...

[jcr]

You can't convince me that Apple, or any of the voice recognition players, are dedicating more processing power in their central servers on a per usage-basis than the mobile devices have natively inside them.

You don't know what you're talking about, but don't let that stop you!

The reason that Siri uploads the audio to a server is that the language models that the recording is scanned against are huge. The bigger the model, the more accurate the recognition can be. You might be happy to replicate all that storage on every single device, but most people wouldn't be.

-jcr

Re: If Siri wasn't a surveillance app...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is so woefully uninformed, Iâ(TM)m not sure where to start... to get the usability from a voice assistant, has required cloud computing resources because phones were not capable of it. While phones are definitely far more powerful today, the cloud as an extension of computing possibilities your mobile device cloud leverage has still won out. Though I think weâ(TM)ll likely see that change in the near future. We are already starting to see custom designed silicone far more efficient at running these extremely complex Deep Neural Networks, like the iPhones Facial recognition hardware. This is just now becoming feasible, and is capable of being placed on-device. So I have no doubt within the next few generations more and more will be kept and processed on device. And truthfully, anyone with at least some knowledge on the subject, knows without a shadow of a doubt, Apple is the company going to the greatest lengths to ensure the privacy and protection of your personal data. There wouldnâ(TM)t have been court battles, fights with the FBI and laws proposed banning the type of encryption they use if this wasnâ(TM)t the case.

Re:If Siri wasn't a surveillance app...

[EndlessNameless]

You can't convince me that Apple, or any of the voice recognition players, are dedicating more processing power in their central servers on a per usage-basis than the mobile devices have natively inside them. Apple phones are a multi-gigahertz computing devices with more DSP power inside them than your PC has.

First of all, speech recognition doesn't run on standard DSPs at all. The platform probably uses the DSP's native noise reduction functionality to get a cleaner input, but modern speech recognition is based on deep learning, which is accelerated on GPUs or custom ASICs. Neither of those things was present in any phone when Apple and Google first shipped voice recognition. All those fancy DSPs for talking and media consumption do jack for speech recognition.

Second, they don't need an insane amount of compute power. The servers alleviate memory pressure and reduce storage demands on the device. Even a limited language model dataset is over a GB. Compare that to a small buffer, maybe a few KB, to tx/rx the voice stream and response.

Mainstream phones ship with 2-3 GB RAM and 16-32 GB storage, which is a serious issue for voice recognition. Budget devices have even less. There should be no issues running the Siri backend service on a decent workstation, but a phone is too cramped. I wouldn't be surprised if Siri's model data is much larger than a GB.

As DRAM and flash densities increase, the ability to run speech recognition software locally will improve. You could get away with much smaller datasets if you are willing to trade off for a smaller vocabulary or lower accuracy, but who would do that? People have complained for years about poor accuracy---and we have finally beaten that problem, for the most part.

Those statements may be true

[93 Escort Wagon]

But I suspect even this "bad press" contains a fair bit of spin. It's hard to write off Siri's lack of skill as simply being due to poor scalability.

Not that I'm all that impressed with Siri's competition, mind you - they're all underwhelming. But Siri is definitely in third place.

Re:Those statements may be true

[beckett]

How about Hound?

Re:Those statements may be true

[tlhIngan]

But I suspect even this "bad press" contains a fair bit of spin. It's hard to write off Siri's lack of skill as simply being due to poor scalability.

Not that I'm all that impressed with Siri's competition, mind you - they're all underwhelming. But Siri is definitely in third place.

No, it's not scalability. Unless you're talking about scalability of information.

Siri is in third place because Siri is basically handcuffed - it's not allowed to access a lot of information. Google and Amazon have privacy policies that basically let their assistants have access to anything and everything on you. and having that sort of access means Google Assistant and Alexa can get to "know you" better and give you better results.

Siri is allowed none of that - it has a privacy policy that is strictly enforced and is not allowed to break, out of its little container to reach out and get more information.

And these days, Siri has to do a lot of its work on-device and only hit the cloud when absolutely necessary. Privacy again, you see.

Re:Those statements may be true

[93 Escort Wagon]

I understand what you're saying, but I don't think it's the whole explanation either.

I'm in the Apple ecosystem, and I've attempted to use Siri a fair bit. I will ask her non-personal questions along the lines of "what time is the Seahawks game tonight?" * - she will interpret the words correctly but simply respond with "Here's what I found on the web regarding 'what time is the Seahawks game tonight'".

That doesn't seem like a privacy issue, it's more of an "Siri isn't particularly good at determining context" issue. Siri falls back to the "here's what I found on the web" default - which I assume is intentional for any case when context can't be determined - far too often.

* This question was made up for exposition purposes - it's possible Siri might actually handle this specific query better than described

Re:Those statements may be true

[Anonymous Coward]

You couldn't have taken a few more seconds to find and post a real, broken example, instead of posting an example that doesn't work the way you described?

When Siri was just asked about the Seahawks next game, the reply was:

"I don't have schedule information for the next Seahawks game yet. There were just beaten by the Cardinals on December 31, 2017; the final score was 26 to 24."

That seems about as good an answer as one could hope for, given the updated schedule won't be released until later this spring.

If you have a better (and useful) example of a "non-personal question" that fails with the "Here's what I found on the web" reply, then share it. Inventing examples without bothering to check them is not useful, even "for exposition purposes".

It hard to tell

[Anonymous Coward]

if apple is lying about the whole thing or just so fucking incompetent.
Probably a little of both.

If siri was so bad to begin with why did apple buy?

Apple isn't that great

[Anonymous Coward]

When you look at how closed end Apple stuff is they really don't work that hard when you consider they live within their own ecosystem. Even Steve Wozniack said Siri was dumb down a lot by Apple because Apple couldn't implement it properly for lack of infrastructure. Finally Apple built some serious server farms but this should have come much sooner than it did.

Re:Apple isn't that great

[Anonymous Coward]

But still greater than most other companies.

That's not what I said

[SuperKendall]

iTunes was announced in 2001, iCloud launched in 2011. For iTunes to finally be perceived as "stable" only very recently

I'm not sure how you got that but I was saying iTunes has pretty much always been stable. They may have some update issues but I personally have only seen sometimes slow updates on release... any large scale system is going to have some issues, which will also be partly due to intervening networks over which Apple has no control.

iTunes has been delivering music reliably since launch.

Funny enough, iCloud infrastructure is outsourced to AWS and Azure (and Google Cloud now) so that explains its own stability

When you come down to it, iCloud was really the only service that struggled - and the WAYS in which it struggled were I think much more down to client side code that server side code, since it was more an issue around things like syncing databases and documents that would fail in odd ways.