Mark Gurman reporting at Bloomberg on Apple getting App Intents ready for the new Siri:
The plan now is to ship the feature alongside a broader Siri infrastructure overhaul in the spring and market it heavily. But there’s some concern inside the company, I’m told. Engineers have been struggling to ensure that the system works with a sufficient number of apps and is accurate enough to handle high-stakes scenarios. There are worries about the software failing in categories where precision is nonnegotiable, like in health or banking apps.
My concern with Siri going back years, long before AI was on everyone’s mind, was that Apple’s approach is too closely tied to a single device. There is essentially a different version of Siri on the iPhone, Mac, HomePod, and so on. Hardly a universal assistant that works consistently everywhere.
I think App Intents is going further down the wrong path. If apps and data are exposed to Siri locally, without anything in the cloud, that’s great for the iPhone but no help if you want to ask the same questions to your kitchen or your glasses. It’s a fixable problem — maybe App Intents could sync between all devices even if the app can’t be installed — but only if Apple acknowledges the limitation.
