Siri AI reaction: two years late, but finally functional

Hey Siri, do you work properly now? The answer is sort of. Apple's rebuilt Siri AI is in developer beta and early testing confirms it finally does what it was always supposed to. Two years late and not groundbreaking, but possibly good enough.

People around the world have been playing with the first early developer access to Siri AI, and it looks, well, okay. It’s not groundbreaking, it’s not awful, it’s two years too late by any measure, but it does finally do some of the things that seem to have been promised by Apple for ages.

It might even make it worthwhile upgrading to an iPhone that runs Apple Intelligence.

Now only six months behind

Bloomberg’s Apple savant Mark Gurman was one of those that tested Siri AI across iPhone, iPad, and Mac for a couple of days, and he came back with a list of things that worked. He successfully asked Siri to move a calendar appointment by referring to the person he was meeting with, rename the event, and swap a dial-in number for a physical address. He retrieved a TV show recommendation a family member had mentioned weeks earlier. He pulled restaurant suggestions out of a search across messages and emails. He had Siri read an email currently visible on his screen inside a third-party app and create a calendar event from it.

None of this is remarkable for anyone that has used another AI assistant. Indeed he characterizes it as being where the likes of ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini were about six months ago. But it does mean that Apple is finally in the game and doesn’t have to pretend that Genmojis are the ‘gosh-wow’ pinnacle of AI deployment anymore.

It is, of course, not perfect. This is beta software, after all, and you can find plenty of forums where people recount bruising experiences with the new Siri that are reminiscent of the early days of chatbots. In fact, the litany of slow results, disappearing queries, misunderstood requests and lost conversations feels eerily akin to the botched rollout of Apple Maps, though in that case it was often you yourself that was physically lost. But the important distinction here is that this is still beta software. There is plenty of time for improvement before release.

Next steps

And there is headroom for further development too. Siri engineering chief Mike Rockwell, speaking to press after last Monday's keynote, described the new engine as "a completely modern architecture" with scope to be extended further. Apple software chief Craig Federighi called agentic functionality "experimental" but left the door open. The expectation is that Apple will move in that direction.

So, come September will we suddenly be presented with software that helps make the process of creating content easier? Probably not. But in all the surrounding tasks that infiltrate our working lives where AI can be genuinely useful we will hopefully have to dive into and out of third party tools that bit less.

The new iMovie?

Siri has been with us for a jaw-dropping 15 years now and has never been at the cutting edge. Siri AI won’t be either, but we suspect few people have ditched the Apple ecosystem because they really really wanted Alexa in the intervening time. Gurman characterizes it as being at the iMovie level while the likes of OpenAI offer the full Final Cut Pro functionality, and that’s probably fair. It just needs to be good enough rather than forging ahead. And if it can manage that without having to spend billions on building data centers and put the last two years behind it as a blip, it will have managed to snatch a victory of sorts from the jaws of defeat.

Personally, I’ll settle for it just giving me the answer to the question I’ve asked rather than directing me to a website for more information when I’m driving.