Gurman said Apple plans to ship the feature alongside a broader Siri infrastructure overhaul in the spring and market it heavily.
Apple’s (AAPL) stock could benefit from more positive headlines as a report suggests that the iPhone maker’s long-delayed artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled Siri could spring a positive surprise.
The underperforming Apple stock received a lift last week from a new $100 billion U.S. manufacturing investment commitment announced by the company following CEO Tim Cook’s tryst with President Donald Trump.
Bloomberg columnist Mark Gurman said if a new feature in Siri, Apple’s personal assistant, works, it could be an “under-the-radar” hit.
He shrugged off the Siri capability that would allow it to tap into personal information to better handle requests, stating that it was not a big deal. Incidentally, the delay in the launch of the improved Siri has been squarely blamed on the difficulty faced by the Siri team in implementing this capability.
The Apple specialist said the real game-changer could be an upgraded version of “App Intents” that could turn Siri into the “true hands-free controller” of the iPhone.
According to Gurman, the new App Intents will enable users to instruct Siri to locate a specific photo, edit it, and send it using their voice. One can post an Instagram post, scroll through a shopping app, add something to one’s cart, or log in to a service without touching the screen with merely voice commands.
“If Apple nails this, it’s not just a nice ease-of-use upgrade — it’s the fulfillment of the vision Siri promised nearly 15 years ago,” the columnist said, adding that this feature will likely be the key to Apple’s next hardware developments.
Gurman said, without the new App Intents, Apple’s products would potentially be even less compelling than the devices that Amazon and Alphabet’s Google launched five years ago.
“Internally, testing and perfecting this feature has become a top priority for its global data operations team, the same group that compares Siri and Apple Intelligence outputs to raw data, hunting for errors and providing information for potential fixes.”
Gurman said Apple plans to ship the feature alongside a broader Siri infrastructure overhaul in the spring and market it heavily.
He, however, cautioned about internal struggles of engineers who have been struggling to ensure that the “system works with a sufficient number of apps and is accurate enough to handle high-stakes scenarios.”
“If the company is actually able to bring it to market (and that’s a gigantic if), it could potentially be a hit that many users didn’t see coming,” Gurman said.
On Stocktwits, retail sentiment toward Apple stock continued to be ‘extremely bullish’ (78/100), with the buoyant mood accompanied by ‘high’ message volume.
Apple stock, which added over 13% last week, was seen modestly lower in overnight trading. The stock is still down 8.2% for the year-to-date period.
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