Problem is, Siri is already damaging Apple's reputation with how useless it is..
Now, it'll show a loading indicator for 5-6 seconds and then do nothing at all... or do something entirely unrelated to my request (eg responding to "hey siri, how much is fourteen kilograms in pounds" by playing a song from my music library).
My personal favourite is Siri responding to a request to open the garage door, a request it had successfully fielded hundreds of times before, by placing a call to the Tanzanian embassy. (I've never been to Tanzania. If I have a connection to it, it's unknown to me. The best I can come up with is Zanzibar sort of sounds like garage door.)
This could be personalized, 'does this user do this kind of thing?' which checks history of user actions for anything similar. Or it could be generic, 'is this the type of thing a typical user does?'
In both cases, if it's unfamiliar you have a few options: try to interpret it again (maybe with a better model), raise a prompt with the user ('do you want to do x?'), or if it's highly unfamiliar, auto cancel the command and say sorry.
A decade and a half is insane timeline in tech industry, and huge majority of users use Siri the same way today as 15 years ago, setting a timer or an alarm clock.
If they had 0 improvements over these 15 years the situation wouldn't be much different than today.
A feature I would love is to toggle "answer calls on speakerphone" based on location, so that I can answer a call with my phone on the desk while I'm at home and not have my ear blasted off taking a call when I'm walking down the street.
Edit: to be clear, Siri doesn’t. Still no reason it shouldn’t be able to.
It’s such trash. Constant conditioning for garbage.
Timers and alarm clocks it is.
Every few years I would try to use it for a few days, then quit in frustration at how useless it was. Accidentally activating Siri is a major frustration point of using Apple products for me.
I've found I appreciate having Siri for a few things, but it's not good enough to make it something I reach for frequently. Once burned, twice shy.
I’m looking at you, Photos sync.
EDIT: just noticed this exact problem is on the front page in its own right (https://eclecticlight.co/2025/11/30/last-week-on-my-mac-losi...)
Things that seemed to work reliably for me 10 years ago but now do not:
1. "Call mom". Siri has apparently forgotten who my mother is. I tried "Hey Siri <name> is my mother" and I got an error. I'm sure it's resolvable but come on.
2. "Directions to <destination>" This always used to fail when it couldn't find places, but lately, when I'm driving, Siri will respond "Getting directions to <destination>" and then... nothing. No directions come up. I have to do it 2-3 times to have the directions actually start.
I was excited when I recently got an iPhone 16 Pro - it comes with Apple Intelligence! Surely this is how Siri leaps into the future and starts doing things like translating for me, or responding with a photo and some basic facts when I ask who Ariana Greenblatt is, or letting me convert from Krore to USD (it gives results for rupees every time it seems?) or...
Anyways, I asked it something basic, and Siri said it would have to use Apple Intelligence. Not like, prompting me if I want to use it, just saying it's needed, then turning off. I'm pretty confused as to what Apple Intelligence is at this point, since I assumed it would be Siri. "Hey Apple Intelligence" doesn't do anything, so I ask ChatGPT. It informs me that AI is, in fact, part of Siri. I... do not know why it gave me that response.
Back to timers and alarms.
Edit - this is your daily reminder that you can NO LONGER SHUT OFF IPHONES BY HOLDING DOWN THE POWER BUTTON.
1. Checking the current temp or weather
2. Setting an alarm, timer, or reminder
3. Skipping a music track or stopping the music altogether roughly 3 seconds after hearing the command, or 1 second after you assume it didn't work
<end of list>
1980s - silicon graphics / general magic
1990s - chief technologist, netscape
early 2000s - CTO Tellme (speech recognition)
late 2000s - CTO Metaweb (knowledge graph) -> acquired into Google
2010s - Google head of Machine Intelligence, Search, Gmail Smart Reply, etc, then took over Google Search and ML driven ranking (BERT)
2018 -> SVP ML/AI Apple to merge Siri/Core ML/all AI offerings under one roof
2023-2025 - led Apple Intelligence push
March 2025 - removed as head of Siri
Dec 2025 - retirement
would love to do an exit interview with him on the last 4 decades in building ai assistants!
Never heard of Tellme, but it sounds impressive on a resume.
Metaweb was a good open-source fact database which subsequently got walled off once Google bought it.
Google Search works significantly worse now than it did under Amit, and I say that as both a user and a websearch Xoogler. (JG took over about a year after I left Google).
Siri is the subject of this article.
Now I'm weighing more on the Apple side for not making it better.
Edit: why in gods name are people downvoting me for politely asking about someone’s differing experience?
I can think of one time recently where no matter how I prompted it to play an album for (decades old but probably triple platinum,) it kept playing some cardi b song with the band’s name in the title instead… but that’s probably like a 1 in 2000 request problem. Maybe its a genre thing?
"Here is what I found about "The Dragonborn comes at 25" on the Internet" opens Safari
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
I pretty much only use it when I can’t look at the phone so I’m not sure if it’s still there.
Not true for me at all, it fails at the most basic tasks, sometimes even at tasks it has done before. Three examples:
- "Timer 5 minutes" -> Loading spinner is shown. Siri disappears after a few seconds. No error, no confirmation. I then have to manually check if the timer was set or not (it was not).
- "Turn on the lights in the living room" to which it responds "Sorry, I cannot do that". I have Phillips Hue lights that are connected to Apple Home, of course Siri can do that. It did that before.
- "Add tooth paste to my shopping list". The shopping list is a list I have in reminders. It then tries to search for the query on Google. I then tried "Add tooth paste to the list shopping list in reminders" which worked, but if I have to be this wordy, it is no longer any convenient.
There are many more simple cases in which Siri always / sometimes fails. I also have the feeling that it performs far worse if asked in my native language (German) than in English.
EG I can talk to it like I would chatgpt and it works well. But I can't be like "hey I want to get dinner with my wife on our anniversary, please book the best available option in my city for fine dining"
It's still way better than Siri, which feels like a voice CLI to me (same as Alexa, which is very low quality IME)
Then LLMs came and it still wasn't "real enough."
Honestly he’s had one hell of a career. Even if Siri sucked.
People increasingly seem to forgo the idea of retaining the data for themselves because they find AI products so fascinating / useful that they're just not caring, at least for the moment. I think this might swing back in the favor of Apple at one point, but right now it is kind of fascinating how liberally people throw everything at hosted AI models.
I see Apple dusting off its OG playbook.
We're in the minicomputing era of AI. If scaling continues to bear fruit, we'll stay there for some time. Potentially indefinitely. If, however, scaling plateaus, miniaturisation retakes precedence. At that point, Apple's hardware (and Google's mindshare) incumbency gains precedence.
In the meantime, Apple builds devices and writes the OS that commands how the richest consumers on Earth store and transmit their data. That gives them a default seat at every AI table, whether they bother to show up or not.
Not the first to bring mp3 players to the market, nor phones, nor tablets. Market leader every time.
They could have just stayed in a corner talking about privacy, offer a solid experience while everything else drowns in slop, researched UX for llms and come 5 years later with a killer product.
I don't get why they went for the rush. It's not like AI is killing their hardware sales either.
They already lost this superpower in the EU and I think Japan, India, Brazil too. Early next year they've got their US antitrust trial, and later in the year are some class actions challenging their control over app distribution, and at least two pieces of draft legislation are circulating that would require allowing competing apps to be defaults.
If they need another two years they might face an entrenched and perhaps even better competitor, while their own app needs to be downloaded from the App Store.
What does seem slightly odd is Apple have probably saved billions by failing to be dragged into the current model war.
Are you referring to https://security.apple.com/com/blog/private-cloud-compute/?
The only way that AI will ever be able to replace each of us, is if it gathers our entire audio, text, etc history. PCC seemed liked the only viable option for a pro-AI, yet pro-privacy person such as myself. I thought PCC was one of the most thoughtful things I had every seen a FAANG do.
Are you saying that there is no technical solution for privacy and AI to coexist? Not only that, but that was the blocker?
I am genuinely interested if anyone can provide a technical answer.
They should actually make something useful first, and then work backwards to making it private before releasing it.
It could potentially help tremendously but for that they would need to understand the usefulness of LLMs and tool usage.
I hope they don’t do anything remotely like that at Apple.
I am completely okay with the Apple approach to date (privacy and late mover cost advantage over progress and burning money/raising prices).
At this point, their investment to ship a better Siri is nearly zero if they take an open source model and run it on the device. Did John really mishandle it, or did he realise this and decide not to burn $BILS of cash and play the long game instead?
Perhaps you are not getting it rammed down your throat because you’re not a business user? On personal editions one area where AI has been a failure is taking over the search bar, but you’re right, you can disable it.
We'd have working voice assistants by now. We're held up by the incessant need to game "engagement" and seek rent.
In reality users just want a goddamn voice interface to their phone. Set a timer, remind me of x next time I'm at location y. Turn on the lights. Set home air conditioning to 72.
Simple, trivial bullshit that has absolutely no monetizable worth. Because it's not profitable enough it's not worth developing at all. I'm half convinced the only reason siri and google assistant even still exist is solely and exclusively because the "other guy" has it.
People argue innovation is impossible without capitalism. I argue innovation is impossible with capitalism. If your idea isn't profitable enough it's not worth any amount of investment regardless of how beneficial the idea might be.
etchalon•49m ago