For a very long time, I urged patience with Apple’s efforts to turn Siri into a truly intelligent assistant. Back in 2023, I argued that the stakes were higher for Siri than for primarily text-based AI systems like ChatGPT.
I’ve also said that Apple’s commitment to privacy poses a far greater challenge for the company’s AI efforts, and that the payoff would be worth it. But it’s gotten harder and harder to maintain this position, and the latest report certainly doesn’t help …
The ‘best, not first’ argument
Apple has very rarely tried to be first with anything. With the vast majority of new technologies, it has aimed to be the best rather than the first. It’s been willing to sit back and watch others make mistakes, to learn from those, and to quietly beaver away in the background on its own version.
I’ve long argued that we should allow Apple to do the same in the case of AI. That doesn’t mean I’ve given the company a free pass, or that I haven’t been personally frustrated by just how dumb Siri has been for just so long: I’ve been expressing my views about this for a very long time.
Two and a half years ago, I pointed to the fact that generative AI systems of that time were a lot dumber than they appeared to be, and that because Siri operated through spoken responses, Apple needed a more cautious approach.
When a Google search shows you conventional results next to a chat window answering the same question, it’s very easy for the company to include prominent warnings that the chat answer may not be accurate.
But Siri is designed to provide spoken answers to verbal questions. Even more annoying than Siri ‘answering’ a question with “Here’s what I found on the web,” would be “Here’s a lengthy answer which you first have to listen to, then I’ll note that it may not be correct, and recommend that you search the web.”
A year ago, I observed that AI progress is not linear, and that if the company really was as far behind as it appeared to be at the time, that didn’t mean it couldn’t rapidly catch up. I also argued that privacy was something worth waiting for.
But it’s increasingly hard to maintain this position
By this year, however, it was getting harder and harder to retain patience with Apple’s glacial progress.
Apple recently had to admit that plans for three new Siri features are “going to take us longer than we thought” – with no real explanation, and no new delivery date. As we noted at the time, these are the very features which promise to make Siri truly intelligent.
I offered a couple of suggestions for ways in which Apple could mitigate the delays, but noted that the only real way out of this mess is if conversational Siri turns out to be spectacularly good.
That length of delay dramatically increases expectations of what 2027 Siri needs to be. Just think about what ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini and Llama and DeepSeek will be able to do by then! Think about Amazon’s new conversational Alexa, and what that will be capable of with another two years of development, using all of the data the company has amassed about the requests people are making of it.
Siri will no longer be judged against the capabilities of today’s chatbots, it will be judged against the ones we’ll have two years from now. That’s going to be a phenomenally high bar, and Apple really needs to reach it.
Apple employees who’ve seen the new Siri are concerned
The latest report certainly doesn’t help. Bloomberg claims that Apple employees who’ve had the chance to test the new Siri are concerned about its performance.
There are concerns from people testing iOS 26.4 — the OS version slated to include the new Siri — about the voice assistant’s performance.
Far from being spectacularly better, as it now needs to be, it very much sounds like it doesn’t even compare with today’s competitors.
When I asked you guys whether we should be able to choose a Siri alternative on our Apple devices, the overwhelming majority of you said yes. It’s honestly now feeling like this may be the only viable solution for Apple in the next year or two at least.
What’s your take? Have you now run out of patience, or do you still believe that Apple can and will deliver? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
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