Siri is truly terrible, but I’m optimistic about the rumored iOS 18 reboot – and here’s why
Twelve years after its launch, Siri now feels like a modern Apple Newton. Both started life as bold new personal assistants, but stagnated and fell by the wayside. And both have been the butt of jokes on major comedy shows – so was the Newton famously skewering The Simpsons, while Siri recently starred in the final season of Control your enthusiasm (warning: the scene in question contains a tirade of expletives).
But while the Newton was put out of its misery and canceled in 1998, Apple put Siri tapping into our iPhones. Well, hardly – anyone who has used Siri will have their own story of frustration with its apparent declining IQ. Apple cannot let this continue. And thankfully, evidence is mounting that we’ll finally get a Siri reboot (or at least a makeover) at WWDC 2024.
Apple is strongly hinting that AI and, to a lesser extent, Siri will be at the forefront of its annual developer conference. The SVP Marketing Greg Joswiak posted on X (formerly Twitter) that the event will be “Absolutely incredible,” with the capitalization offhandedly spelling AI. Additionally, the promo’s typography (below) also contains echoes of Siri’s color scheme.
But a wave of credible rumors and Apple’s own machine learning research also support the theory that Siri could soon become, if not great, then at least not an anachronistic embarrassment.
How exactly could Apple reboot Siri in June? It’s a long way back. Every time I spoke to ChatGPT’s built-in voice feature, I was amazed at how natural it felt in comparison. The problem is that ChatGPT doesn’t have direct access to iOS to control my phone (unless you use shortcuts). And Apple apparently doesn’t have the generative AI skills (or willingness to compromise on privacy) to make good cloud-based AI.
The solution will likely be a compromise, combining Apple’s latest on-device machine learning with third-party AI models such as Google Gemini. That could result in a complete reinvention of Siri, but if it rescues the voice assistant from its current malaise, that would be good enough for me…
A private chat
A Siri reboot isn’t a sure thing at WWDC 2024, as the latest rumors are a bit confusing. This week, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman claimed that Apple “has no plans to debut its own generative AI chatbot” at WWDC 2024.
But that doesn’t mean Apple isn’t planning some Siri upgrades. Apple has never seen Siri as a chatbot like ChatGPT – since June 2021, the voice assistant processes our questions on the device by default. “This addresses one of the biggest privacy concerns for voice assistants, unwanted audio recordings,” Apple said in a press release at the time.
Apple almost certainly hasn’t changed its mind since then. So the improvements to Siri’s on-device performance will have to come from Apple – and there are indications that the tech giant has been looking into this.
Put #WWDC24, June 10-14, in your calendar. It’s going to be absolutely incredible! pic.twitter.com/YIln5972ZDMarch 26, 2024
Last week, Apple researchers published a March 2024 paper testing whether it’s possible for voice assistants to ditch trigger words like “Siri” and instead use on-device AI to determine whether you’re talking to your phone or someone talk differently. This followed Apple’s quiet release of a family of multimodal models (AI models that can interpret different types of data simultaneously) called MM1.
For the article on voice assistants, Apple researchers trained a large language model (LLM), based in part on OpenAI’s GPT-2, to look for voice patterns that indicate whether or not we ask for help via our phone. That’s some pretty futuristic stuff. While the results were promising, it’s probably too early for this kind of technology to make its way to iOS 18 or our iPhones.
Still, Apple is clearly working hard on voice assistant technology and we’ll likely see some of the fruits of this at WWDC 2024. Just six months ago, Apple quickly increased its spending on conversational AI to “millions of dollars per day,” according to a report from The Information . Given the rapid progress of its rivals, some of these investments will surely go towards improving Siri.
New Siri announcements have not completely died out in recent months either. In December 2023, Apple announced that its new S9 SiP (system in a package) meant the Apple Watch Series 9 and Watch Ultra 2 could “now handle Siri requests on the device”. This meant you could now ask Siri for more than twenty health data markers, as your data wouldn’t leave the smartwatch.
None of this is the work of a company that has given up on its voice assistant. The question is what Apple will do about the biggest part of the puzzle: answering questions that Siri on the device can’t answer…
I’m not sure I understand…
If Siri can’t answer a question, you can ask it to search the web for you. This is where Apple may want to outsource to an external AI model to help with more challenging questions – with Bloomberg predicting this could be Google Gemini in the US and Europe, also with Apple in discussions with Baidu in China according to the Wall Street Journal.
Bloomberg’s report says this generative AI could include “heavy lifting” functions such as “creating images and writing essays based on simple prompts.” But these AI functions will be delivered via the cloud, with Apple still using its own AI models to handle on-device functions and Siri actions.
This mooted Google Gemini deal would not be unusual for Apple. The tech giant doesn’t have its own search engine, so it has a longstanding deal (reportedly $18 billion per year) with Google to make it the default option in Safari. That deal is now under threat from EU regulators.
Bloomberg says a similar deal for Google’s Gemini AI models would simply build on the existing partnership between Apple and Google – again, if regulators allow it. It could even be a useful replacement for the current deal between the tech giants, if it doesn’t buckle under the pressure of regulatory scrutiny.
Whatever happens with these conversations, Apple appears unable to solve the entire generative AI puzzle on its own — and unwilling to change its stance on privacy. That will likely mean some compromises for an upgraded Siri, rather than a giant leap.
Baby steps
The point is, I’m not demanding (or expecting) a full relaunch of Siri at WWDC 2024. All I want is for Apple to acknowledge Siri’s existence, make it less noisy, and outline how it can create a more high-profile version of it to make. conversational iPhone assistant. Currently, Siri is holding back the potential of products like the AirPods and Apple Vision Pro, but in iOS 18 things may take a new turn.
Siri has been held back for years by internal quarrels, a lack of technological breakthroughs and the broader problem that voice assistants don’t generate much revenue. But if, as rumors suggest, Apple outsources some of its generative AI functions to the likes of Gemini AI, then it could catch up while reducing its liability when the occasional controversy arises.
None of this would push Siri to become a voice assistant leader. But it would be enough to keep Apple in the AI game while reviving one of the iPhone’s most frustrating features. Right now, Siri is hurting Apple’s reputation, so WWDC 2024 has to be a tipping point somehow.
Tim Cook has already promised during an earnings call with Apple’s annual shareholders that the company will “break new ground” in generative AI this year. While that doesn’t necessarily refer to Siri, could Apple do all that while keeping Siri as is? I do not think so. And while Cook said the technology will “unlock transformative possibilities for our users,” I only hope Siri turns it into more than just a kitchen timer.