Siri AI

It's interesting how anemic the use cases seem to be - we see the same things recycled over and over: "reword my email", "remove object from picture", "add a reminder", "summarise my text message which was already only 20 words long" etc etc. As if these are the major problems in people's lives.

I really feel like there's a fascinating valley of death between simple things that actually work and things of real value that are actually still beyond the horizon. They either aren't reliable enough, aren't accessible to the tech, or exceed the sophistication of our existing trust models. For example, I'm planning a trip. Booking a multiday holiday - there's a real beast that is time consuming, complex and painful. I test out the AI tools. They fail. Hard. Hallucinations all over the place, false confidence, inability to act, inability of me to trust their actions.

It's just nowhere near practical utility yet. Not "nearly there" but "not nearly half way there". I got the top tier of Gemini AI. Can it rent me a car? "As an AI I can absolutely guide you through the process of renting the car, but I can't physically access the web site or type in the details for you".

I didn't really see anything that knocked my socks off. Mostly, it's the promise that Siri now works in the way in which they said it would work a few years ago, when it didn't. I do like the addition of Siri in the context menu, though. I can see that being useful.

The demo Mike Rockwell gave at WWDC was interesting. He kinda showed off Siri as like the Star Trek computer for your phone. I hope this is the direction Apple is going to continue in. Having AI as a user interface is way more interesting than chat bots, image editors, or copy editing.

None for the EU

Is it available in China at least or is this another “50% of the userbase gets nothing new in the OS update” year?

Edit: https://x.com/wongmjane/status/2064052590992916840?s=46

Lol

I strongly believe Apple can win the consumer AI space. They have incredible distribution and hardware. They just haven’t executed at the application layer yet.

They promised Apple Intelligence with iPhone 15 Pro and more recent models.

Now [relevant parts of] Siri AI is restricted to iPhone 17 / iPhone Air and more recent models.

People who believed Apple and bought an iPhone 16 to use with Apple Intelligence are getting the shaft.

The second slide on the site is… it’s gotta be a troll from some pissed off designer, right?

Screenshotted in case they change it https://imgur.com/a/n1I3z8g

They’re adding vibecoded shortcuts (the high level scripting for Apple devices). Hopefully that means they worked out some of the long-existing bugs and missing features, but I’m not optimistic. Still, could be a useful tool, especially for less tech-literate people.

I switched from android to iOS 7 years ago and I’ve actually been debating going back just because of how bad iOS is at AI. And every other facet of my life, I am finding ways for it to save my time on an almost daily basis. And yet on iOS, just finding something from a text Message is still a nightmare.

Siri seems to rarely get better and sometimes actually get worse.

>Fix passwords with a tap.

>The Passwords app alerts you to weak or compromised passwords and can update them on your behalf without the hassle.

Finally, I hope this works well. Personally one of the worst things to deal with.

In Feb this year, when I analyzed KuzuDB's source code, I predicted Apple's reasoning to buy them was to introduce Siri with cross-app personal context. "..WWDC 2026 or 2027 introduces any “contextual intelligence” features in Siri that require cross-app relationship reasoning." https://medium.com/data-science-collective/i-analyzed-163k-l.... There is no confirmation on which tech is being used to achive that though

Microsoft cannot compete in browser race and has to adopt Chromium.

Apple cannot compete in AI and has to adopt Gemini

Google is a really amazing company.

No, I don't want Apple to read all my emails, text messages and photos. I'm probably not going to buy Apple devices any more if it really works like this, by default sending all your data into their cloud.

If I want to use AI, I want to be able to select the exact messages / photos which I want to send to it. Otherwise I expect the device to keep the data protected. I don't need any of these features either; I can remember if someone sent me a cookie recipe.

This looks pretty promising to me. It will likely replace the need to set up OpenClaw for average personal users. The work of getting email, messages, and all the personal data on the phone as context seamlessly is not as straightforward as one might think.

I'm curious how the pricing will work. Would it be free up to some limit and then some subscription pricing? I can't imagine it can be free unlimited usage given the price of serving these models.

The chatbots(ChatGPT, Claude et al) showed Apple exactly what can be done, the user base is already well primed. So this is a product definition done for them to execute. If done well they will be able to provide a much stronger integration into the day to day use cases than the chatbots, and can siphon off user time from them. This time around the end to end is easier with Apple Intelligence and more importantly llms doing the work Apple is floundering at. So I am hopeful, but I still see the os/app level integration as not enough in terms of functionality to make it a hit. The primary use case for llms is still conversations and search. Apple should be focusing on that aspect primarily and also add the os/app level integration as a bonus - as something only they can do. If they just do the latter, it will not be as much of a success. Let’s see how they execute.

EDIT: To provide meaningful chat functionality they have to either eat up the cost or charge a subscription for it. This will be first time they charge for Siri - a product that doesn’t garner any positive reviews. This gets even more interesting to watch

> Aga sent you a message about Calanthea, a plant.

> Aga: have you heard of Calanthea? It’s a plant.

Really groundbreaking use of AI!

I've not seen anyone discuss yet what kind of impact these AI features are likely to have on battery life. If they are running small on-device models, this will have a measurable impact on battery life with regular usage.

Before they add AI they better fix the frigging search function in settings, it is horrible, you need to know their exact words, and Apple has a funny naming sense. Hierarchies nested so deep you never find anything. I come to use Claude or ChatGPT to tell me the right incantations to find a setting.

I wonder how much of Siri AI is Apple-developed and how much of it is Google-developed as a result of Gemini. The a) search demos and b) image generation demos seem unlikely to have been done by Apple alone, the demos being closer to Google Search and Nano Banana respectively.

To this day, Siri does not understand "Subtract 5 minutes off my timer" when having an active timer

In English!? Someone please Apple that LLMs can deal with multiple languages at once without the old “go to Settings to configure your language”

They should have changed the name as per branding. I hear Siri, I subconsciously associate it with really bad software.

Quite possibly one of the most lackluster WWDC's I can remember. And I've been a fan of Apple/Mac since the late 80s.

Hmph.

That said, I'm THRILLED they claimed to "fix" the border radius snafu of Tahoe. Go ahead and push that now with the next Security fix. We won't mind at all.

I placed eggs into boiling water and because my hands were wet I used voice and said "hey Siri, start a timer". It replied "you'll have to unlock your iPhone first", so I hovered my face over the bench the phone was sitting on, then the screen rattled and prompted for the numeric passcode. Ugh..

Using Siri essentially required me to use my hands anyway, so what's the point of voice?

I'd very seriously consider moving away from iPhone to a device that treats voice AI as a first class citizen (presently I mapped the 'double back tap' to open grok voice chat, and triple back tap to end it, which is a wonderful improvement over not having these, as you can do that pretty easily, even while driving etc).

The only way Siri will meaningfully save my time would be if it could doomscroll for me. All of the things Siri claims to automate here would save me maybe a couple of minutes total over a week, wouldn't make the tiniest dent in my screen time.

What is not demoed are basic AI capabilities I need today to effeciently use my iPhone. Examples: - Siri, send the latest 20VC podcast to my watch. I'm going jogging. - Siri, do not start Apple Music. I do not use that app. Start Podcast. - Spell check and Auto-Correction on iMessage should support French and English. I switch from the 2 all the time. - Etc...

I'm sure you guys have tons of others to list.

I read through the entire DMA rant that apple has here: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/06/due-to-dma-siri-ai-de...

This feels like it could be solved with a list of permissions that the user has to turn on when using 3rd party AI.

Apple already:

    1) requires developers to submit ID to publish an app on the appstore (at least I had to after ~1000 downloads to be able to publish an update)
    2) has strong kernel enforced memory integrity and disallowes arbitrary code execution (unless explicitely approved for games like roblox, jitting not allowed tho has to be interpreted).
    3) reviews every app update.

I feel like this is nothing more than Apple being angry that they have to allow people to actually choose what AI they want on their phone. This is particulary interesting if anthropic and openai decided they want to add siri ai override to their apps allowing them to take advantage of the apple ecosystem without signing some kind of deal like they had to with Google. I assume behind closed doors Google had to make some sacrifices for them to be the model powering siri.

In my opinion, this is late by almost two years. This should have been the v1 when they first presented Apple Intelligence.

So Siri is basically now a Gemini agent?

Our family uses Siri with a HomePod a lot, and it's already much better than it was a couple of years ago where it could basically set timers, tell you the weather. Now it answers questions ("when did the Knicks last win an NBA championship") with decent answers, instead of "I'll send the web results to your phone". But it's still far behind voice-chatting with Claude in the Claude app, so very much looking forward to this upgrade.

I will say though that proper voice transcription in Claude -- or any of these agents -- sucks. If it can't understand the question properly, then it can't provide the right answer. It works okay for me, but not for my kids, not when speaking quickly or in incomplete sentences (as people tend to do), etc.

This whole "coming this fall", "later this year", it's annoying. I miss the days when Steve Jobs used to say "and it's available right now, you can demo it in the hall outside, we're going ot make a billion dollars by tonight."

Coming this fall...

In "English" later this year...

We've heard that before, haven't we, Apple? I feel the right way to fix the trust issues would be to announce this when it's actually done. Like, here's Siri AI, and you can download and use it, right now.

> coming this fall

I believe we also heard that a couple years ago.

> Available on iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max, iPhone Air, iPad models with M4 and later and at least 12GB of unified memory, and Mac models with M3 and later and at least 12GB of unified memory.

It’s really disappointing to see the on-device models being limited to so few devices. And this was after the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro were marketed so heavily with supporting their now failed effort at AI.

The killer app would be a locally run Siri that learns about you and your preferences.

Here's what I want: natural language interaction to achieve complex workflows in iPhone. Example: find the cheapest way to go from A to B and book it using the Deutsche Bahn Train app.

I still don't think Siri can do that ::angry::

The most notable thing here is that they finally have the primitives to make Siri actually useful across apps. I can't even use Siri to close Google Maps in my car right now.

Why would they wait so long to launch this? With every passing day countless people further ingrain ChatGPT / Claude as their default chatbot...

for olders iphone models - i am on 15 - are they allowing any sort of extensions? that would allow some apps to make use of of to build things like better speech recognition etc..

i was waiting for siri update and bummed it is not supported on 15.

when i use my native language (i mostly do it when in carplay) to search songs etc.. it gets it wrong a lot of times.

+ a more integrated into things like imessages, whatsapp etc..

I wonder if Apple actually posttrained or at least finetuned this model or if it's just standard gemma. I feel it'd be bad practice if they didn't at least have some training atop it for apple's tools. Also you don't really hear much about apple's in-housed private compute servers anymore, did they get outmoded? I only hear about them using nvidia now.

Will I be convinced to change my iphone 6s? #suspense