Siri 2.0: Apple brings in the Vision Pro team to revive its voice assistant

Apple has made a radical change at the helm of Siri, putting Mike Rockwell in charge, a move that clearly suggests senior executives deemed the company's progress in artificial intelligence inadequate.

According to a new report, Rockwell is already moving swiftly and making major changes to the teams responsible for Siri, with the aim of completely transforming it. As Mark Gurman reports in Bloomberg, the new head of engineering has begun restructuring Siri's leadership, replacing key executives with people from the team that worked on Vision Pro.

As part of this internal reorganisation, changes are also being made to the teams working on critical areas such as voice output, natural language understanding, user experience and overall system performance.

More specifically, the new roles include:

• Ranjit Desai, an experienced Vision Pro executive, taking overall responsibility for Siri engineering, including its core infrastructure.
• Olivier Gutknecht, also from the Vision Pro team, leading the team focused on user experience.
• Nate Begeman and Tom Duffy, two experienced Apple software directors, helping to rebuild Siri's architecture.
• Stuart Bowers, taking on an expanded role focused on improving Siri's understanding of and response to users' needs.
• Finally, David Winarsky, a veteran Siri leader, now overseeing all voice and speech functions.

As Gurman sums up, Rockwell is either removing or bypassing the previous leaders and, in a bold strategic move, entrusting the people who developed Vision Pro with solving Siri's long-standing problems and taking it into a new era.