The Real Siri AI Problem

Apple have finally made Siri useful. Partly because they paired it with an LLM, which is really good at taking human rambling, combining that with a data source and turning it into output. But also because they've thrown away the tower of cocktail sticks and chewing gum it was built on before.

My issue is not that it doesn't work, it's that I have such rare reason to use it.

I've listened to several podcasts where the hosts have waxed lyrical on this problem. They all seem to think it's because Siri used to be so bad, they've trained themselves out of trying to use it.

But having previously set up a Home Assistant Voice Preview attached to OpenAI, what me and my family found was that we just didn't have that many things that we wanted to ask it.

The Google Home in our kitchen is used for setting timers and playing music, the same usage pattern Amazon found after it sold millions of Alexa devices at a loss. Devices upgraded to Alexa+ are still being used to do the same thing, except now every pasta timer costs Amazon more (and doesn't always start).

In a business setting, Claude can be genuinely helpful. As a developer, it's game-changing. And for certain users, a true "personal" assistant could be too. But Siri AI has none of that agentic capability. It's a search box dressed up in it's Sunday best.

The aforementioned podcasts use this in their examples. Finding door codes and social security numbers in Messages. That's not a sign that Siri AI is good, it's a sign that the search in Messages is bad and now you have to use an alternative.

And search is not personal context. It knows nothing about my likes or dislikes, who I am, what I'm trying to achieve. It just has a vector database it can search. There's no way to provide that additional context, nor does it seem to use any of the context it could access - my current location for example - without explicit instruction.

Maybe it doesn't matter. The tech press will give Apple a pass for no longer being so far behind, the investment community will see this as them making progress towards digital God (which is what they seem to want).

And your average user will continue playing music and cooking their dinner.