The "what they hoped" is a question of "what who hoped?"
When you look at SiriKit when compared to Google and Alexa, it is an entirely different approach that isn't designed for general tooling of a voice assistant but rather the intents show that it is designed for specific functionality of specific types of applications.
Asking Siri for things outside of those intents was always delegated out to some other service (Wolfram Alpha was the choice for a while).
Siri was never designed to try to monetize the voice interface (compare Alexa and Google) and thus wasn't trying to do everything and SikiKit shows that it can't do quite a bit. So that it can't do everything shouldn't be a surprise to Apple.
Comparing Siri to Alexa, they are very different architectures with different goals and support costs.
If you look at https://www.apple.com/siri/ you should get the idea that this is interface to common tasks - not a general "do everything and chat about it" assistant. What's more, it limits what goes off device (whereas Alexa and Google do all speech to text on the cloud).
"Your intelligent assistant that helps you get things done just by asking"
I suspect Scott Forstall and Jobs wanted it to be what LLMs show the potential for it to be. Not the crappy barely functioning timer setting app it currently is.
Siri is dumb as rocks, it's so bad at basic queries it's not worth trying to use.
Yes, it would be nice to have LLM style power - but that isn't how Siri was architected even from the very start. Word combinations are recognized as certain intents and parsed for functions to call into apps that register that they are able to handle that function call.
If there was no match for the intent, it was sent to Wolfram Alpha to do a knowledge base lookup. While Wolfram is really good, it certainly isn't a chat bot.
Siri wasn't supposed to be smart. Siri was intended for an interface to the existing apps of phone, music, messages, calendar, reminders, map routes, email, and weather.
When you look at that segment, 12:48 "just take your phone and ask Siri to set a timer for 30 minutes and you're done." Siri was very much intended as a timer setting app.
What functionality in there that you see in this segment that isn't designed as an interface to existing apps? What time cue do you see them promising something smarter than what was designed?
Google's voice assistant is an interface to google cloud applications.
Siri is an interface to a limited set of the apps on the iPhone.
These are fundamentally different architectures for how how each was designed along with implications for privacy and where the company has compute resources that can be used.
If you are after a general knowledge search engine, Google will certainly out preform Siri.
Google has better cloud integration for a lot of their functionality. Apple doesn't have that amount of cloud resources that it can use and is a device first company rather than a cloud first company.
If you want to say "android can search google better" Ok. I'll grant that. If that makes it "smarter" - ok. Android is smarter than Siri because it can search google better.
If you want to say "android can control apps on its phone better" - I really want to see evidence that the ability for Android to control 3rd party music apps (e.g. Spotify) or report the weather or calendar or set up alarms... I don't believe that android is any better than Siri in that regard.
If you want to chat with it (e.g. "what is the answer to life the universe and everything?") then those are cute responses that are programmed in.
Do you have other criteria that you are using to compare the different devices other than its ability to search Google?
You can adversarially frame "ability to intelligently answer questions" or act as an "intelligent assistant" to "ability to search google" but those are different things. I'm comparing the use case of the former as an end user.
Siri will often uselessly "find results on the web and send them to my iPhone". Google can answer more queries directly as well as do basic timer setting stuff. The thing you're missing is the implementation detail is irrelevant to the end user, it's an issue of capability.
Your point about Apple being worse at cloud is partly what I'm talking about (and one of the reasons siri is so much worse). It's why Apple has not done a good job with this up until now. I don't buy the "it's intentionally not capable/bad by design because that's what they were going for" argument.
My prediction is Apple will make some sort of move here. Whether that's an investment in stable diffusion or something else I don't know. I expect what they do to have an apple flavor (on-device, privacy focused), but I think it will be leveraged to make Siri actually useful (and more of an actually intelligent and capable assistant).
My advice would be "don't expect them to do anything with LLM or similar so that when they don't, you won't be disappointed."
Expecting Apple (or any company) to be chasing the current hype is more likely to be disappointing (see Google and Bard or Bing and its mistakes). Apple, with its very cautious nature for curation of its brand image would likely be some time out.
I would also point out that Apple's prominent place in regulatory views would make it more hesitant to do things that they may have to open up.
I don't believe that Apple has any appetite for becoming more of a target for government regulators or wading into untested legal waters. But that's my crystal ball - yours apparently sees different things.
I agree w parent that the end user is who matters--Siri is just not very good at answering what seem like basic questions.
What made google amazing was it settled conversational disputes or provided instant (if limited) familiarity on a subject. Siri fails to provide verbal feedback on relatively simple questions, instead referring people to their iPhones for "web results."
As an end user, the product's failure understand or make sense of the intent of a user is even harder to deal with in Home / HomeKit. I often find myself pulling up the Home app to hunt down and manually operate some accessory because voice requests are just failing.
Common patterns happen throughout a home covered in HomeKit and Homepods and yet this AI is unable to provide reasonable suggestions for automation modifications, scene tweaks or suggestions for additional accessories.
Siri-based requests for songs or albums from Apple Music on HomePod is abysmal, providing covers, or flat out wrong genre, wrong era that my listening habits should well weight away from.
It is just bad--architecture design be damned the product fails under "normal" use. Outwardly, it seems like a MobileMe-level failure, where SJ asked at a town hall "Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?"
All that said, I agree with this comment that it is a mistake to expect Apple to integrate LLM that uses any known model into its product.
Even if Apple wanted to, I don't know where the company could source data that is manicured to "safe" enough to serve as a basis for responses by Siri.
It doesn't really matter, to end users how they fix it.
The company's job is to drop the product or iterate until it figures out how to better satisfy they end user.
When you look at SiriKit when compared to Google and Alexa, it is an entirely different approach that isn't designed for general tooling of a voice assistant but rather the intents show that it is designed for specific functionality of specific types of applications.
Asking Siri for things outside of those intents was always delegated out to some other service (Wolfram Alpha was the choice for a while).
Siri was never designed to try to monetize the voice interface (compare Alexa and Google) and thus wasn't trying to do everything and SikiKit shows that it can't do quite a bit. So that it can't do everything shouldn't be a surprise to Apple.
Comparing Siri to Alexa, they are very different architectures with different goals and support costs.
If you look at https://www.apple.com/siri/ you should get the idea that this is interface to common tasks - not a general "do everything and chat about it" assistant. What's more, it limits what goes off device (whereas Alexa and Google do all speech to text on the cloud).