Here's Why Apple Failed With Siri

The engineers behind Siri are working on a new artificial intelligence system, but not at Apple.

Viv Labs, which includes members from team that made Siri before the company was bought by Apple, wants to make an "intelligent interface to everything."

But those engineers didn't exactly leave Apple on good terms, according to Wired's Steven Levy.

Levy says the creators of Siri were wooed into selling their company by Steve Jobs, who wanted to incorporate the now ubiquitous personal assistant into every iPhone.

But not everyone at Apple was as impassioned about what Siri could be as Jobs. This caused a rift between Apple executives and their new colleagues.

Within a few months of the iPhone's launch, two of the three minds behind Siri had left Apple. One Siri cofounder, Adam Cheyer, told Levy he probably would still be at Apple if Jobs were still living.

This dig at Apple reflects not only the respect Jobs had for what Siri could be, but also the challenges Cheyer and others faced while integrating into a massive tech company that didn't uniformly value Siri's technology.

In short, the Siri creators thought Jobs was the only person at Apple who had the vision to turn Siri into what they thought it could be. Instead, the Siri we have now is routinely criticized for not being as good as other digital assistants like Google Now and Microsoft's Cortana.