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Apple is finally catching up with Siri, but the goalposts are moving again
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While it is great that Siri AI can finally deliver Apple’s promise of an actually useful, personal assistant for the age of AI, expectations surrounding agentic assistants are quickly shifting. But Apple is showing it might not watch from the sidelines again.
Now that Siri AI (which is still officially designated as a beta) has been out for a little more than a month, it seems fair to say that its two defining characteristics are that it’s finally useful, but it can be painfully slow to answer even simple queries.
And while I had spent the better part of the past few months mocking Silicon Valley’s obsession with AI assistants that can book flights and hotels, I hate to admit that the first time Siri AI actually impressed me was when I asked how much I’d paid for a hotel room for an upcoming trip to San Francisco and how far it was from my first appointment in the city. It got both answers exactly right.
Could I have looked this up myself? Sure. But setting aside the fact that I was in the middle of a 10K run at the time, finding that information on my own would undoubtedly have taken longer than it took Siri to give me the answers.
As a result, over the past few months, I’ve found myself increasingly relying on Siri AI for questions like “What was the contact information for that plumber who fixed the kitchen sink leak a couple of years ago?” or “What was the name of that PR person who introduced me to so-and-so?”
Information I know I have somewhere, be it an iMessage conversation or an email receipt, and that although I could just search for it, I’d now rather have Siri AI do it for me.
And for the first time in 15 years, I can ask these questions without already expecting Siri to fail halfway through asking them, only to get frustrated when it inevitably gets it wrong and proves me right.
That’s all well and good. The problem is that Apple has only now caught up with what AI assistants could do in 2024.
Particularly over the past few months, the frontier AI market has increasingly shifted toward agentic assistants, with products from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and xAI (among many others) moving beyond answering questions to actually carrying out tasks on users’ behalf.