When I first tested the developer beta of Apple’s Siri AI by taking it as my tour guide around San Francisco, I was convinced the overhauled smartphone assistant would be an “everything tool” on the iPhone. The answers felt reliable enough and more helpful than previous versions of Siri. Also, the chatbot-style app for Siri felt very sleek, very Apple-y.
Over the next month, I kept experimenting with the Siri AI in the iOS 27 beta. The tool was quite powerful, especially with the personal context brought in by indexing the contents of my phone. Finding an ancient text message or photo has never been easier. Even so, my usage of the smartphone assistant slowly started tapering off.
It’s not that Siri AI isn’t better now. It is! This new version is quite the step change, which makes my reaction even more devastating. Siri AI isn’t revolutionizing how I interact with my phone the way I’d initially hoped, especially as an AI assistant built directly into the device and factoring in that Apple gives more thought to preserving my privacy than many other AI companies.
Even though I wasn’t going out of my way to interact with Siri AI, I didn’t mind how it was now, essentially, the search bar for the smartphone. As the summer months faded, I wasn’t souring on Siri AI. Instead, I just grew more neutral.
Old habits die hard. Soon I was back to my regularly scheduled doomscrolling on Instagram and aimless Yelp expeditions. I was manually typing and swiping for myself rather than relying on a smartphone assistant for help. And I was already low-key locked in with another chatbot, Anthropic’s Claude, and already used that app fairly often on my phone.
Even though some AI power users may not go all in on this new Siri, analysts say this won’t matter, since everyday users are often fine with Apple’s default software. “Will Siri bear the weight of criticism for not being as good as some of its peers? Sure,” says Dipanjan Chatterjee, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, a research and consultancy company. “Will it make a difference to the vast installed base of iPhone users and cause them to look elsewhere? Not a chance.” Some iPhone users trust Apple with their data in ways they don’t with any other company. Siri AI may reap those same benefits.
Tech analysts see Apple’s long-cultivated consumer trust in data privacy as potentially a compelling distinction. Ramon Llamas, a research director analyzing the mobile device market at the International Data Corporation, believes users deep in the Apple ecosystem, who previously had qualms about the safety of other AI tools, may be open to trying the new Siri.
My experience with Siri AI—loving it and then leaving it for dust—may be an outlier. Many other beta testers are still rocking with the smartphone assistant.
“In the past, I was unwilling to trust that Siri could do anything useful,” says Avi Greengart, founder and lead analyst at Techsponential. “But with the latest beta software, I’m finding myself not only using it more, but for more things: Siri is now able to find information buried on my phone faster and more efficiently than any other method, its world knowledge is vastly better than before, and even dictation works better.”
That said, the cultural backlash to generative AI has been brewing. Another solid segment of iPhone owners may choose to avoid the new Siri altogether because of the AI attached to its name. Whether it’s a moral objection or broader distrust of AI tools, these holdouts are unlikely to be won over by Siri’s feature improvements.
Ultimately, my own summer fling with Siri AI was short-lived. But I promise, it’s not you. It’s me.
Read the full article here