Siri AI(apple.com) |
The interface for creating them manually has been so bad for so long, it feels clear to me that LLM-driven shortcut orchestration was always the endgame. Apple built up their ecosystem of composable "tools", and then trained an LLM on how to call them.
The result, IMO, is the first OpenClaw/Hermes competitor that's feasible for use by the general public.
Everyone with a paid Claude or ChatGPT that they're struggling to use to the fullest is going to have very little reason not to swap over to an upgraded iCloud+ plan (if they don't already have one). I suspect we're going to see mass cancellation of $20/mo plans very soon.
OpenAI's timing for removing their temporary increased usage limits is looking pretty unfortunate...
I have shortcuts set up to count the hours I log in my work Google calendar and copy them to my clipboard to help me prepare invoices.
So while I've already been sold on what Shortcuts can do, getting the general public to see the possibilities is probably gonna be a challenge.
1 is performance. It's slow. You can run one within the app and literally watch execution flow from one block to the next. Absurd, for the CPU power at hand.
2 is reliance on developers to deliberately implement hooks and "intents" when the developers of at least half of apps including most "big company" apps do not care to bother, often because 95% of their app's surface is actually cross-platform stuff.
Example: There are no shortcut actions for Google Calendar, and Gmail only has one real one which is a generic send email. No "search email" etc.
I'd rather see Apple lean into "computer use" to allow it to use any app that displays things on the screen, but IDK how you make that safe.
> Your data is never stored
> Used only for your requests
> Verifiable privacy promise
Apple is cooking. Although at that point might as well bring the cloud features to more devices. Yeah it costs more but also locks users in harder.
Wait... don't tell me... there is an App for that.
What do you mean?
I can't wait to take a photo of a cricket ball and ask it what it is, ffs.
These people need to get out, touch grass, watch trees swaying in the breeze, and put their phones down before they lose toonmany neurons.
At this point, “Siri” has a pretty strong cultural association with being underwhelming or unhelpful. Even if the new version is dramatically better, convincing people to give Siri another shot may be harder than launching the same technology under a new name.
Feels like a missed opportunity to reset expectations.
That’s what I expected from Siri but you can get in from ChatGPT .
Genius way to sell more phones
Really they are just selling on device Ai
Apple cares greatly about their brand yet this has hurt their brand like nothing else in the past decade
So while they could win, it’s pretty hard to get hyped about it before we see real-world tests.
I'm curious how the pricing will work. Would it be free up to some limit and then some subscription pricing? I can't imagine it can be free unlimited usage given the price of serving these models.
Meta also realized this and attempted multiple times to build their own hardware but they've given up each time. They started as early as a partnering with HTC in 2011 to make a Facebook phone.
Quite frankly, I'm kind of excited to see what OpenAI can build. I think an AI-first phone could challenge iOS and Android. It's a new paradigm and if OpenAI gets it right, it'll be very hard for Apple and Google to pivot.
I personally think chat + code is the future of apps. For example, I find myself wanting to do many things inside ChatGPT instead of traditional app because I can tell it to do things that are simply impossible on a static app UI. For example, I have some data I want to send to an app but before I do, I want ChatGPT to clean the data in some way first. And then after the data is uploaded, I want ChatGPT to pull some data off the API and make charts that I want to see.
I imagine a world where very intelligent models run at 10k tokens/s, app building is extremely standardized, and it simply builds any app you want inside the OS. IE, if you want a dashboard of your health data, you ask it to build it almost instantly exactly how you want it. I'm already doing something similar today but it's slow and not easy to do for non-engineers.
Incidentally, that’s what’s preventing Apple from rolling out their OS-privileged AI in the EU, as the EU mandates equal access for competing AI products. It will be interesting how this plays out.
I was working in cellphone sales at the time and I can tell you no one wanted that phone back then even when Facebook was massive. An easy to hit facebook button was not a value add anyone was begging to exist.
Although with how many phones now have stock forced installs of Meta apps perhaps they won their con in the long game.
Similarly no one really wants a physical AI device, and attempts at such are pure techbro hubris on the companies part.
Is it available in China at least or is this another “50% of the userbase gets nothing new in the OS update” year?
Edit: https://x.com/wongmjane/status/2064052590992916840?s=46
Lol
What's really happening is Apple unilaterally withholding features while making vague noises about regulation as bargaining chips in talks with EU regulators where Apple is trying to weasel out of punishment for breaking anti-monopoly laws.
>EU users will be able to access Siri AI on macOS 27, visionOS 27, and watchOS 27.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/06/due-to-dma-siri-ai-de...
Apple’s performative DMA outrage is getting more pathetic by the iOS version.
"Try describing something different for the shortcut."
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that it still doesn't work.
Finally, I hope this works well. Personally one of the worst things to deal with.
I believe we also heard that a couple years ago.
15 years ago they had the balls to run Siri live on stage: https://youtu.be/6rL9EL2LlrA?is=5yMQxs0C2VAC5Lwz
EDIT: To provide meaningful chat functionality they have to either eat up the cost or charge a subscription for it. This will be first time they charge for Siri - a product that doesn’t garner any positive reviews. This gets even more interesting to watch
It seems like revisionist history to say that; lots of people were sold on iPhones years ago because of Siri. They have one of the few business cases for voice assistants, which are notoriously difficult to actually monetize, that actually makes any sense, since "selling iPhones" is meaningful and "selling a subscription" would be nice on top of that.
I'm sure they customized some of it, but this looks basically like Gemini integrated with iCloud instead of Google Workspace.
In my mind the Gemini LLM defines the bounds of capability and capacity, but any actual functionality or usefulness (or lack of) comes from Apple’s Siri harness.
But that's a big If!
(It’s been driving me crazy there’s no “AI this” button to discuss whatever is on my screen.)
Note: I have MS 365 personal or whatever it's called this week so I'm not sure how Copilot acts for a completely free user.
I still don't think Siri can do that ::angry::
It’s really disappointing to see the on-device models being limited to so few devices. And this was after the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro were marketed so heavily with supporting their now failed effort at AI.
All the iPhone 16/Pro owners have been waiting for Apple Intelligence features announced from that WWDC 2 years ago. They didn't get delivered and now won't ever be delivered with on-device intelligence due to the 8GB RAM limitation.
iPhones have 12gb, current Neo has 8gb, the next gen Neo is speculated to have 12gb (as it'll be based on a later iPhone chip).
At first I thought it was the usual planned obsolescence. Then I realized it may be a true technical limitation. I suspect an embedding model is required to run on device in order to make several of the features work. Embedding models are small compared to LLMs, but, depending on their capabilities, could be the memory driver.
Pho is a pretty bad source of fiber.
It sucks that we're skipping over such good tools like cronometer.com to figure out what we're actually eating and going straight to hallucination, adding more confusion to nutrition.
But fundamentally, the real difference is they have now bought and white-labeled Gemini to replace all the stuff they failed to make 2 years ago.
Unfortunately not for other fields like email, notes etc…
IMHO the perfect password app could just keep all previous versions of any field until the user deletes the history.
There's a 0% chance it will work. Most websites I've seen have one or all of:
* Force you to use email or SMS as a "second factor" to unlock changing password even if you know the old password
* A stupid idea of password complexity usually requiring one of a finite set of 5-8 "special characters" which is often only revealed after you've chosen a password that doesn't have them. Or in some cases even banning characters other than the ones they check for. There's a standard for this where you put a regex on the password field, which a good password manager will always use, but the kind of idiots who think limiting the entropy of passwords to increase security is the correct way to do things almost NEVER implement this.
* A maximum password length, even as short as 16 characters in many cases
* CAPTCHA etc.
Any effort spent on this would be better spent elsewhere, including even educating other companies on how passkeys should be used.
I don't really believe in Apple being that quality team.
Why?
AI could potentially help solve those unpopular site/app/whatever edgecase.
I think it just feels uncreative? Siri as a brand has some value, but if you want it to feel like a watershed moment where old Siri is "behind us" finally, just give it a new name.
AI is a technology, not a product. Consumers don't care about technologies, they care about what the product does versus what they currently have.
I think Jobs was an asshole, but one good thing I can say about him is that he understood the difference between technology and products. Imagine if they had called it the "iPod HDD."
To prove my point, I opened a random date on the Apple website matching today's date to compare. 16 years ago, June 8 (1) Apple released the iPhone 4. There's still no room for jokes about that release, and from this perspective, calling their AI 'Apple Intelligence' feels weak compared to what they used to deliver.
I agree that some years ago Apple was the strongest in marketing, their brand team had been setting the bar for tech, but I simply can't say that anymore.
1. https://web.archive.org/web/20100608073904/http://www.apple....
The stock price definitely didn't like it though.
It's not even funny, it's not smart. It's like if they released MS Siri and said it's Mac System Siri.
git + somesite.com.gpg
https://github.com/FiloSottile/passage (or: forked using AGE instead of GPG)
Siri and Voice Control were both usable during the same time and it feels like it could work here too.
Totally agree that AI is just an implementation detail though. IMO that new product name should NOT have “AI” in it at all.
It's legit to be skeptical on the privacy front, but giving deepseek access to my entire phone. Or the TrumpAI at some point in a dystopian future seems... not great.
Opening up an API does not mean that everything on the phone is accessible to anybody.
The text responses had Gemini's verbosity. Asking ChatGPT to show me iconic dishes from both Brazil and Morocco (Apple's example), is much cleaner, less verbose. Quick list of dishes and links to the recipe. Gemini just spews a wall of text and bullet points and goes on and on with fluff. Tons of "What this dish is" "Why it works" Same with its frequent use of tables, which I see less of with ChatGPT.
Each Siri demo they did in the keynote had that hallmark verbosity I typically get with Gemini without prompting it to not do that.
For pedantry's sake, they were saying "AI = Apple Intelligence" last year as well, so it's not like they just pulled it out of their butts now that popular opinion has turned against AI.
This doesn't follow for me. They can trivially allow it to still respond to the old wakeword. They should absolutely change the name in the event they can finally make it useful, because "Siri" is (in my mind and many others') a synonym for "hapless idiot." "Thanks, Siri" has been uttered hundreds of time in my house and my car, and 100% of the time it's sarcastic.
Many of those people will speak a language that’s not English, or live in the EU or China where it’ll still be “Siri”, not “Siri AI”.
“Do you have the new Siri?”
“Yeah I updated… but she still seems so dumb”
“Oh yeah… well that’s Siri for you I guess”
Horrifying for marketing folk, I would presume. You’re just setting people up to confirm that Siri is always useless and improvements are invisible.
If OpenAI makes their own AI-phone, do they have to let Anthropic and Deepseek run their models on it too?
provided it gets big enough, yes. the EU's position roughly is "if this hurts an entire market just to benefit you, and lots of people use / rely on it, then you gotta allow it"