Apple reportedly moved Kim Vorrath, a vice president in charge of program management who is known for fixing troubled projects, to the company’s artificial intelligence and machine learning division to work on AI and Siri.
The move comes at a time when Apple has fallen behind its competitors in both AI and chatbots, Bloomberg reported Friday (Jan. 24).
Vorrath’s move has not been announced publicly but was shared with Bloomberg by unnamed sources, according to the report.
Apple did not immediately reply to PYMNTS’ request for comment.
Vorrath has been with Apple for 36 years and has managed the development of difficult projects and implemented procedures that catch and fix bugs, the report said.
She led project management for the original iPhone software group; oversaw project management for the iPhone, iPad and Mac operating systems until 2019; and, most recently, helped launch the Vision Pro headset, according to the report.
Apple’s AI division aims to overhaul the underlying infrastructure of the company’s in-house AI models and Siri, per the report.
Apple Intelligence launched in October with only basic features before getting some more advanced ones later; Siri has been criticized for not understanding requests, failing to execute simple commands and failing to match the capabilities of competitors’ digital assistants; and the company’s AI-generated news summary feature was removed after generating false content, the report said.
When Apple integrated Siri with OpenAI’s ChatGPT as part of a series of updates in December, it sought to make the voice assistant a tool for everyday life, PYMNTS reported at the time.
“Apple is enabling ChatGPT access in Siri and Writing Tools experiences within iOS, iPadOS and macOS, allowing users to access its expertise — as well as its image- and document-understanding capabilities — without needing to jump between applications,” the company said in a Dec. 11 press release.
When the company launched Apple Intelligence in October, it said these AI features can perform tasks like summarizing long email threads, prioritizing urgent messages, transcribing and summarizing phone calls and voice recordings, and performing natural language searches of photos and videos to find specific moments or objects.
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