Mike Rockwell is Overhauling Siri's Leadership Team [Report]

Apple is undertaking a significant leadership overhaul within its Siri engineering division, according to a recent Bloomberg report. Mike Rockwell, recently appointed head of Siri engineering and also the executive leading Vision Pro software, is spearheading the changes.

Rockwell is reportedly restructuring Siri's management team, bringing in several key figures from his Vision Pro group to lead critical areas of the voice assistant's development. This includes teams focused on speech recognition, language understanding, performance, and the overall user experience. The move aims to address ongoing challenges and development hurdles that have affected Siri.

The need for revitalization comes as Siri, first introduced in 2011, faces increasing competition and internal development snags. Project delays and engineering issues reportedly prompted Apple CEO Tim Cook to seek fresh leadership for the division.


Several top deputies from the Vision Pro software team are moving into crucial Siri roles. Ranjit Desai, known for his work on high-performance systems for Vision Pro, will now oversee much of Siri's engineering platform. Olivier Gutknecht, another senior Vision Pro software executive, is taking charge of the Siri user experience team.

Veteran Apple software managers Nate Begeman, who worked on visionOS, and Tom Duffy, previously involved with core iPhone software elements, are also joining to manage Siri's underlying architecture. These engineers are regarded as experienced talent adept at handling complex projects.

Existing Siri leaders are also seeing role adjustments. Stuart Bowers will reportedly have an expanded role focusing on data and how Siri determines responses, while David Winarsky will lead a new group managing all voice and speech components. These changes effectively replace or reassign prior managers in key engineering positions.

While taking on Siri, Rockwell continues to lead the visionOS software team. His Siri responsibilities now fall under software engineering chief Craig Federighi. To backfill the moves, Geoff Stahl, a longtime Rockwell deputy, will manage the former visionOS software teams whose leaders transitioned to Siri.


This move coincides with reports detailing struggles inside Apple's broader AI and machine learning efforts. Those struggles became more public earlier this year after quality problems forced Apple to indefinitely postpone several advanced Siri features unveiled at WWDC, including deeper personal context awareness and enhanced App Intents for controlling apps. Reports indicated the system faced significant reliability problems.

Part of the ongoing technical work involves consolidating Siri's architecture. Currently operating with separate systems for basic tasks and newer large language model (LLM) based functions, the goal is to move towards a single, unified LLM system for a more conversational experience, though this transition may take time.

Efforts to launch the updated App Intents feature, now under Gutknecht, will involve close collaboration with third-party developers and deep integration within Apple's own applications.

The wider AI division reportedly remains under John Giannandrea, who reports to Tim Cook. Robby Walker, the former Siri head, continues to report to Giannandrea and remains involved with Siri, though many engineers have moved under Rockwell's direction.

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