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Two years and a $250 million lawsuit later, Apple’s AI Siri revamp is on its way to your phones and laptops and even your mixed reality headset, if you happen to be one of like three people who actually uses the Apple Vision Pro. Apple revealed a slew of new information at Monday’s WWDC keynote about these long-awaited, AI-powered updates that can take advantage of the fact that our hardware is supposedly “built for Apple Intelligence.”
To be honest, it’s hard for AI to impress me enough that I’ll use it in my day-to-day life. I still don’t trust LLMs to provide consistently accurate information, I find it ethically untenable (and uncool) to use AI to help me write, and I don’t feel the insatiable urge to know what I would look like as a Studio Ghibli character. But every once in a while, the promise of AI tempts me.
That’s how I felt watching Apple’s Siri AI demos, which depict a world where your phone comes with an always-on, constantly-working assistant who knows everything about you and can help you keep track of all of the conversations happening on like 12 different apps on your phone at any given moment.
To paraphrase Katy Perry, it feels so wrong (what are the privacy implications?), but it also feels so right (I am so overwhelmed by my phone and am begging for help parsing it all).
I want Siri to be my own personal Emily from “The Devil Wears Prada” — a “second brain” that anticipates my needs before I even know what they are. I want Siri to read my texts and automatically make an event when a friend and I decide we’re going to meet up for dinner on Thursday. I want Siri to remind me when I’m walking past CVS that I have a prescription ready for pickup. If I forget to reply to an important work email, I want Siri to remind me that I didn’t write back yet.
Siri AI won’t be able to do all of that out of the box, but it’s moving in the right direction. In one example at WWDC, Justin Titi, an Apple senior director working on AI engineering, asks the smart assistant to remind him of the dessert that his daughter mentioned recently. Siri searches across Titi’s phone to find a text from about a month ago, when his daughter mentioned that she wanted to make coconut cookies. It’s simple, but asking Siri to find that message saves time, rather than scrolling up through an entire month of conversation looking for that one specific text.
The new-and-improved Siri is designed to use “personal context,” which refers to any information you put into Apple-native apps, like iMessage, Notes, Calendar, Mail, Photos, and more. Siri will also be aware of what’s on your screen, so for example, if you scroll past a picture of a nice park on Instagram, you can ask it to find out where that park is. (We still don’t know if Siri will be able to integrate into non-native Apple apps; it seems like it might be up to the developers to make that happen.)