Apple Inc executive Kim Vorrath, a company veteran known for fixing troubled products and bringing major projects to market, has a new job: whipping artificial intelligence and Siri into shape.
Vorrath, a vice president in charge of program management, was moved to Apple’s artificial intelligence and machine learning division this week, according to people with knowledge of the matter. She will be a top deputy to AI chief John Giannandrea, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the change has not been announced publicly.
The move helps bolster a team that is racing to make Apple a leader in AI — an area where it has fallen behind technology peers. The company has struggled to match the capabilities of OpenAI, Meta Platforms Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google. And its Apple Intelligence platform has suffered from a slow and bumpy rollout.
Photo: AFP
The Siri digital assistant, groundbreaking when it was unveiled in 2011, has come to symbolize Apple’s shortcomings in AI. Upstarts like OpenAI have created their own, more versatile chatbots, and smartphone rival Samsung Electronics Co has been faster to weave artificial intelligence features into its software. Amazon.com Inc is also adapting its Alexa platform for the AI world.
Vorrath, who has spent 36 years at Apple, is known for managing the development of tough software projects. She joins the new team from Apple’s hardware engineering division, where she helped launch the Vision Pro headset.
A spokesperson for Cupertino, California-based Apple declined to comment on the move.
Over the years, Vorrath has had a hand in several of Apple’s biggest endeavors. In the mid-2000s, she was chosen to lead project management for the original iPhone software group and get the iconic device ready for consumers. Until 2019, she oversaw project management for the iPhone, iPad and Mac operating systems, before taking on the Vision Pro software. Haley Allen is to replace Vorrath overseeing program management for visionOS, the headset’s operating system, according to the people.
Prior to joining Giannandrea’s organization, Vorrath had spent several weeks advising Kelsey Peterson, the group’s previous head of program management. Peterson will now report to Vorrath — as will two other AI executives, Cindy Lin and Marc Schonbrun. Giannandrea, who joined Apple from Google in 2018, disclosed the changes in a memo sent to staffers.
The move signals that AI is now more important than the Vision Pro, which launched in February last year, and is seen as the biggest challenge within the company, according to a longtime Apple executive who asked not to be identified. Vorrath has a knack for organizing engineering groups and creating an effective workflow with new processes, the executive said.
It has been clear for some time now that Giannandrea needs additional help managing an AI group with growing prominence, according to the executive. Vorrath is poised to bring Apple’s product development culture to the AI work, the person said.
This year, the artificial intelligence group is focused on revamping the underlying infrastructure of Siri and improving the company’s in-house AI models, Giannandrea said in the memo.
The company debuted its Apple Intelligence platform in October, but the initial version only included basic features like text-message and notification summarization.
Apple has promised to overhaul Siri as part of the AI rollout, but that element is not ready yet. The company aims to release a new version of the digital assistant as part of iOS 18.4 in April, Bloomberg has reported. The new version is designed to better respond to queries by tapping into the customer’s data. It can also identify what is currently on a user’s screen and more precisely control applications through a system called App Intents.
The current version of Siri has drawn criticism for not understanding requests and failing to execute simple commands. And even when the promised features do launch, they would not match the capabilities unveiled by Samsung, which uses a mix of its own technology and the Google Gemini platform.
Apple is working on an even more advanced version of Siri that includes a more conversational interface — something more in line with ChatGPT and other AI offerings. It would not be ready until at least next year, though Apple might give a preview of the software this year, Bloomberg has reported.
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