Hey Siri, hereās what I actually want from AI
Two years and a $250 million lawsuit later, Appleās AI Siri revamp is on its way to your phones and laptops and even your mixed
Two years and a $250 million lawsuit later, Appleās AI Siri revamp is on its way to your phones and laptops and even your mixed reality headset, if you happen to be one of like three people who actually uses the Apple Vision Pro. Apple revealed a slew of new information at Mondayās WWDC keynote about these long-awaited, AI-powered updates that can take advantage of the fact that our hardware is supposedly ābuilt for Apple Intelligence.ā To be honest, itās hard for AI to impress me enough that Iāll use it in my day-to-day life. I still donāt trust LLMs to provide consistently accurate information, I find it ethically untenable (and uncool) to use AI to help me write, and I donāt feel the insatiable urge to know what I would look like as a Studio Ghibli character. But every once in a while, the promise of AI tempts me. Thatās how I felt watching Appleās Siri AI demos, which depict a world where your phone comes with an always-on, constantly-working assistant who knows everything about you and can help you keep track of all of the conversations happening on like twelve different apps on your phone at any given moment. To paraphrase Katy Perry, it feels so wrong (what are the privacy implications?), but it also feels so right (I am so overwhelmed by my phone and am begging for help parsing it all). I want Siri to be my own personal Emily from āThe Devil Wears Pradaā ā a āsecond brainā that anticipates my needs before I even know what they are.
I want Siri to read my texts and automatically make an event when a friend and I decide weāre going to meet up for dinner on Thursday. I want Siri to remind me when Iām walking past CVS that I have a prescription ready for pickup. If I forget to reply to an important work email, I want Siri to remind me that I didnāt write back yet. Image Credits:Apple Siri AI wonāt be able to do all of that out of the box, but itās moving in the right direction. In one example at WWDC, Justin Titi, an Apple Senior Director working on AI engineering, asks the smart assistant to remind him of the dessert that his daughter mentioned recently. Siri searches across Titiās phone to find a text from about a month ago, when his daughter mentioned that she wanted to make coconut cookies. Itās simple, but asking Siri to find that message saves time, rather than scrolling up through an entire month of conversation looking for that one specific text. The new-and-improved Siri is designed to use āpersonal context,ā which refers to any information you put into Apple-native apps, like iMessage, Notes, Calendar, Mail, Photos, and more. Siri will also be aware of whatās on your screen, so for example, if you scroll past a picture of a nice park on Instagram, you can ask it to find out where that park is. (We still donāt know if Siri will be able to integrate into non-native Apple apps; it seems like it might be up to the developers to make that happen.) There already are apps like Poppy and Poke that try to create this kind of mobile, agentic AI.
