This is obviously a death march project. Just delay it indefinitely until the Google Gemini based Siri chatbot is ready. Why ship something half-assed?
This was such a self inflicted own goal. Siri has needed work for years and every year they neglected it. When they first bought Siri it was state of the art and then it just languished. Pulling an Intel and sweating your assets until it is too late is never a good idea.
Are Apple AI agent delays bearish for AI agents in general? Unless something else is the issue it’s normal behavior for Apple not to implement something everyone else already has until it’s very good and solid.
It doesn't surprise me that Siri continues to be bad - Apple's current plan is to use a low-quality LLM to build a top-quality product, which turned out to be impossible.
What does surprise me is that Google Home is still so bad. They rolled out the new Gemini-based version, but if anything it's even worse than the old one. Same capabilities but more long-winded talking about them. It is still unable to answer basic questions like "what timer did you just cancel".
Is it not impressive what xai did with Grok? It's already integrated into twitter and my Tesla. So quickly? What prevented apple from doing the same but building out their equivalent of grok?
I feel like the difference between Steve Jobs’ and Tim Cook’s leadership styles is that Cook is really good at optimizing existing processes, but does not have the vision to capitalize on what’s next.
Apple got into the smartphone game at the right time with a lot of new ideas. But whatever the next big shift in technology is, they will be left behind. I don’t know if that is AI, but it’s clear that in AI they are already far behind other companies.
The other difference between Steve and Tim is Steve would have never been caught dead giving a gold gift to a sitting president. It comes off as desperate and evil, two things Steve would have hated associating with Apple.
i have said it before: the Vision Pro with Mac screen linking is a tease for a complete Mac-superior spacial interface. The new high end device from Apple for the future. An interface that levels up a MacBook Pro’s or Studio’s power and productivity.
Except no. After getting the hardware right, Tim gave us an another iOS toy / media kiosk (in 3D!) for $3500.
I would have paid $5000 if it was the new developer friendly, macOS spacial, pro software, room-scale interface machine.
I would have thought Tim Cook would have been proud to push the product line / user interface, bicycle-for-the-mind bar higher during his tour of duty. An historic computing advancement.
But I guess raising the media kiosk, novelty apps and purchases, third party creator tax, service subscriptions and scammy ads with no ad-free tier revenue bar, is what he wants to be remembered for.
Not sure whether it's a language/pronounciation issue but for 15 years since siri was released i have not seen a single person using it successfully without having to yell at it for not waking up or not understanding the request correctly
i guess im a unicorn haha. I routinely control my home (shades, lights, fans), set reminders for myself, set timers while cooking, and reply to (simple) text messages.
I got myself an iPhone 16 Pro because of the promised AI features. I had a vision in my mind of what it ought be like:
While driving past a restaurant, I wanted to know if they were open for lunch and if they had gluten-free items on their menu.
I asked the "new" Siri to check this for me while driving, so I gave it a shot.
"I did some web searches for you but I can't read it out to you while driving."
Then what on earth is its purpose if not that!? THAT! That is what it's for! It's meant to be a voice assistant, not a laptop with a web browser!
I checked while stopped, and it literally just googled "restaurant gluten free menu" and... that's it. Nothing specific about my location. That's nuts.
Think about what data and access the phone has:
1. It knows I'm driving -- it is literally plugged into the car's Apple CarPlay port.
2. It knows where I am because it is doing the navigating.
3. It can look at the map and see the restaurant and access its metadata such as its online menu.
4. Any modern LLM can read the text of the web page and summarize it given a prompt like "does this have GF items?"
5. Text-to-voice has been a thing for a decade now.
How hard can this be? Siri seems to have 10x more developer effort sunk into refusing to do the things it can already do instead of... I don't know... just doing the thing.
Given the way current LLMs hallucinate, and given that Apple (presumably) won’t accept this behaviour in Siri, I’m skeptical that existing technology (or existing technology scaled up) can ever create the Siri Apple and its customers want.
The Siri experience just really really really sucks for the year being 2026. So much more frustrating than the claude and chatgpt experiences I have had in recent months.
To my Apple Watch: "Hey Siri, tell me what the time is in the central time zone right now"
"I found this on the web", watch shows a link to time.gov
The only thing I find Siri useful for is: a voice-activated timer, handy in the kitchen when my hands are full and I am juggling multiple timed process. It does that well about 80% of the time.
Seems weird to comment on delayed new features from Apple. Obviously if it doesn't meet the quality bar it would get pushed back, that's just how they do things.
But I wonder how much of the problem is due to trying to minimise data processing off-device. Even with Open AI as a last resort, I don't imagine you get much value choosing betwixt the local model or a private cloud that doesn't save context.
Meanwhile the average user is yeeting their PII into Altman's maw without much thought so Siri is always going to seem rubbish by comparison.
> Siri doesn’t always properly process queries or can take too long to handle requests, they said
I mean, for anyone familiar with LLMs this is not exactly a surprise. There is no way Apple can remove the inherent downsides of this technology regardless of how enthusiastic the ai bros are about it.
In a twisted way, I’m happy there are at least some teams at Apple where it doesn’t get a pass for bugs just because it has AI on the sticker
I think we can conclude at this point that the guy yelling at engineers to "just stick ChatGPT into Siri" doesn't understand that the result is unusable, for whatever reason. That reason might be that the UE is bad, or because it grossly violates user privacy, but it might be that Apple would loose $$$$$ because LLM inference is expensive.
It's hard to imagine that just killing off Siri would hurt iPhone sales. It would be interesting to know how many people actually use, or even want Siri, or any type of voice assistant for that matter. The primary value of Siri is to check a box for investors, who are riding the AI wave. The same people how rode the voice assistant wave 15 years ago.
There's a lot of AI features that makes sense for Apple to include and develop, a voice assistant isn't one of them. If they want to turn Siri into an Apple ChatGPT, then that's slightly different, and more about getting yet another product that would make users sign up for a monthly iCloud subscription. If it's all on device though, that doesn't really seem like the goal.
Everyone keeps arguing that AI is not Apple’s core business and that their priorities are different. From an end-user perspective, that is irrelevant.
What users actually experience is this: every other major platform is shipping increasingly capable intelligent assistants. These systems can interpret intent, execute multi-step actions, and meaningfully reduce friction. Meanwhile, Siri still struggles with fairly basic workflows.
At the end of the day, I do not particularly care about internal constraints, organizational structure, privacy positioning, or strategic rationale. What matters is whether the product works.
Today, I still cannot reliably:
- Dictate complex voice input without constant correction
- Use voice to control my iPhone in a composable way such as “open this contact and send a message,” “replay the song I liked yesterday,” or “create a note in Obsidian with this content: …”
- Chain actions together in a way that reflects actual user intent
These are not futuristic requests. They are practical, everyday workflows that competitors are increasingly able to handle.
The gap is no longer about incremental feature parity. It is about whether Apple can deliver a genuinely intelligent interface layer, or whether Siri remains a deterministic command parser in an era where users expect contextual reasoning.
30 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 55.1 ms ] threadOr are these challenges very Siri/iOS specific?
What does surprise me is that Google Home is still so bad. They rolled out the new Gemini-based version, but if anything it's even worse than the old one. Same capabilities but more long-winded talking about them. It is still unable to answer basic questions like "what timer did you just cancel".
Apple got into the smartphone game at the right time with a lot of new ideas. But whatever the next big shift in technology is, they will be left behind. I don’t know if that is AI, but it’s clear that in AI they are already far behind other companies.
Except no. After getting the hardware right, Tim gave us an another iOS toy / media kiosk (in 3D!) for $3500.
I would have paid $5000 if it was the new developer friendly, macOS spacial, pro software, room-scale interface machine.
I would have thought Tim Cook would have been proud to push the product line / user interface, bicycle-for-the-mind bar higher during his tour of duty. An historic computing advancement.
But I guess raising the media kiosk, novelty apps and purchases, third party creator tax, service subscriptions and scammy ads with no ad-free tier revenue bar, is what he wants to be remembered for.
While driving past a restaurant, I wanted to know if they were open for lunch and if they had gluten-free items on their menu.
I asked the "new" Siri to check this for me while driving, so I gave it a shot.
"I did some web searches for you but I can't read it out to you while driving."
Then what on earth is its purpose if not that!? THAT! That is what it's for! It's meant to be a voice assistant, not a laptop with a web browser!
I checked while stopped, and it literally just googled "restaurant gluten free menu" and... that's it. Nothing specific about my location. That's nuts.
Think about what data and access the phone has:
1. It knows I'm driving -- it is literally plugged into the car's Apple CarPlay port.
2. It knows where I am because it is doing the navigating.
3. It can look at the map and see the restaurant and access its metadata such as its online menu.
4. Any modern LLM can read the text of the web page and summarize it given a prompt like "does this have GF items?"
5. Text-to-voice has been a thing for a decade now.
How hard can this be? Siri seems to have 10x more developer effort sunk into refusing to do the things it can already do instead of... I don't know... just doing the thing.
To my Apple Watch: "Hey Siri, tell me what the time is in the central time zone right now"
"I found this on the web", watch shows a link to time.gov
The only thing I find Siri useful for is: a voice-activated timer, handy in the kitchen when my hands are full and I am juggling multiple timed process. It does that well about 80% of the time.
But I wonder how much of the problem is due to trying to minimise data processing off-device. Even with Open AI as a last resort, I don't imagine you get much value choosing betwixt the local model or a private cloud that doesn't save context.
Meanwhile the average user is yeeting their PII into Altman's maw without much thought so Siri is always going to seem rubbish by comparison.
I mean, for anyone familiar with LLMs this is not exactly a surprise. There is no way Apple can remove the inherent downsides of this technology regardless of how enthusiastic the ai bros are about it.
In a twisted way, I’m happy there are at least some teams at Apple where it doesn’t get a pass for bugs just because it has AI on the sticker
They are late with a release, they must have unlearned to build software.
There's a lot of AI features that makes sense for Apple to include and develop, a voice assistant isn't one of them. If they want to turn Siri into an Apple ChatGPT, then that's slightly different, and more about getting yet another product that would make users sign up for a monthly iCloud subscription. If it's all on device though, that doesn't really seem like the goal.
Is this really a reason to delay though? It's not like the current Siri is capable of processing queries outside of "set a timer"
What users actually experience is this: every other major platform is shipping increasingly capable intelligent assistants. These systems can interpret intent, execute multi-step actions, and meaningfully reduce friction. Meanwhile, Siri still struggles with fairly basic workflows.
At the end of the day, I do not particularly care about internal constraints, organizational structure, privacy positioning, or strategic rationale. What matters is whether the product works.
Today, I still cannot reliably:
- Dictate complex voice input without constant correction
- Use voice to control my iPhone in a composable way such as “open this contact and send a message,” “replay the song I liked yesterday,” or “create a note in Obsidian with this content: …”
- Chain actions together in a way that reflects actual user intent
These are not futuristic requests. They are practical, everyday workflows that competitors are increasingly able to handle.
The gap is no longer about incremental feature parity. It is about whether Apple can deliver a genuinely intelligent interface layer, or whether Siri remains a deterministic command parser in an era where users expect contextual reasoning.