How Apple stopped the Siri disaster, and quietly became great at AI

When Siri was originally released on the iPhone 4S back in 2011, the reviews were somewhat lukewarm. On the positive side, having an intelligent assistant baked into a massively popular smartphone was a huge leap forward. On the other hand, Siri didn't always perform as advertised. Even more problematic was that Siri's feature set was purposefully stunted by Apple. In fact, the Siri Apple released in 2011 wasn't even as capable as the Siri app that Siri's original developers had previously released on the App Store.