Siri AI? I'll believe it when I see it | Macworld
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Apple’s WWDC keynotes are usually reminiscent of a painstakingly curated meal at a high-class restaurant. Perhaps a little iPad software as an amuse-bouche, sir? Then, can I recommend the iPhone as your starter, the Mac for the main course, a small dish of Apple Watch to clear the palate, and finally just a soupçon of Vision Pro as dessert. WWDC26, which saw the various OSes crammed together willy-nilly, was more like the anarchy of an all-you-can-eat hotel breakfast.
Partly, this seems to be the result of Apple not having all that much to say about each product in isolation. As in September 2023, when Apple suddenly cared passionately about the environment, the company’s lengthy discussion of the (undoubtedly important) subject of child safety was a giveaway that its commercial priorities didn’t merit as much stage time as usual. But mainly it was because the feature that did need extensive discussion, Siri AI, is integrated across the ecosystem. Siri AI’s alluring promises are relevant to nearly every Apple customer.
Personally, though, I’ll believe it when I see it. We’ve been here before: two years before, to be exact, when Apple Intelligence was unveiled at WWDC24. Apple was adamant that a new contextually aware version of Siri would be ready in time for iOS 18 and the 16-series iPhones, and even made a commercial showing this off. In the end it turned out that building a contextually aware Siri was quite a bit harder than the company expected, and it had to pay compensation to iPhone 16 buyers who felt ripped off.
Did Siri AI look decent in the demos? I suppose it did. As I’ve explained elsewhere, it doesn’t exactly feel like a cutting-edge voice assistant, with what seemed to be distinctly mediocre performance on the speed front without any stand-out features you can’t get from any number of other chatbots. But it looks a lot better than current Siri, and that’s what I wanted.
Apple was keen to emphasise that Siri AI is significantly more accurate than its predecessor. It has the contextual awareness we were promised in 2024, which makes it far more powerful and capable; instead of having to begin from scratch each time you make a query, you can depend on the software keeping in mind the context of previous comments, along with relevant personal data, information, and images onscreen, and the content of your emails and messages. It’s easier to have a conversation with someone who’s well informed.
For the first time, Siri is getting a dedicated app. This means you can easily access previous conversations and the information contained within, and carry on where you left off. Better still, you can start a conversation on your Mac at work and then continue this on your iPhone on the train home. And Apple says the new version of Siri can perform actions in more apps, giving it agentic powers to accomplish multi-step tasks.
As I say, very little of this is new in the wider sense. While Siri AI has access to parts of your iPhone that no other AI agent has, I wouldn’t expect the average AI enthusiast to get excited. But current Siri has set the bar so low that these moderate upgrades are hugely appealing to me. The problem is that at this point, so much is still unsure.
Those demos, for example. How legit are they? Is Siri AI actually that reliable, or did they have to run multiple attempts and take the best? Are we sure that was even live software and not a simulation like in the commercial? One of the biggest negatives of the switch from live to recorded event presentations is that demos become essentially meaningless as a measure of a feature’s real-world experience.
There are political uncertainties, too. Apple says Siri AI won’t initially be available on iPhone or iPad in the EU because of the Digital Markets Act and admitted that “there is currently no timeline” for this to happen. For now, it can only handle English; the company says it “will quickly expand support for more languages,” but again, doesn’t offer a date.
Privacy is central to Apple’s marketing of Siri AI, but that too is a point of uncertainty. We know that some user data will be processed on Google servers, but it isn’t clear exactly how this will be protected. Apple has its own Private Cloud Compute technology but this doesn’t appear to offer good enough performance, so Nvidia’s “confidential computing” feature may have to do the job...