“At one point, Rockwell’s team considered building alternative methods for controlling the device using voice commands, the people said (the headset team ultimately ditched that idea).”
Apple’s own headset team found Siri so bad it thought about building a replacement. Three engineers Apple bought with Laserlike in 2019 left for Google, after Sundar Pichai wooed them personally and Tim Cook failed to keep them. The big compromise after an all-hands was a button to report bad Siri answers. Apple is so afraid of an embarrassing answer that it ships no useful ones.