Apple's new Siri finally works, but rival AI helpers now do far more

Siri AI, Apple's rebuilt assistant, now works the way Apple promised. A 9to5Mac writer says it is finally useful. The catch is that it can be painfully slow, and assistants from other companies already do much more. Siri AI is still officially a beta and has been out for a little more than a month.

What Siri AI does well

The strength is finding things you already have somewhere on your phone. The writer asked how much was paid for a hotel room on an upcoming San Francisco trip and how far it was from the first appointment. Both answers were right. Other requests included a plumber's contact details from a couple of years ago and the name of a PR person who made an introduction.

For the first time in 15 years, the writer says, asking Siri these questions no longer feels like waiting for it to fail.

Where it falls behind

The writer argues Apple has only caught up with what AI assistants could do in 2024. Products from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and xAI have moved on to carrying out tasks for you. That means opening, creating, editing and organizing files, and working with websites and services you are logged into.

Those companies sometimes ship major updates weeks apart. Apple still mostly follows an annual software release cycle. Next to ChatGPT finishing a task, the new Siri can feel like the old one again.

The privacy question

Today's task-doing assistants mostly know only what you give them permission to see and what you tell them. Apple may be able to change that. Last month it introduced two Apple Watch features that use the watch's microphone.

• Siri Recap creates summaries of your conversations through the day.
• Live Rewind lets you replay the last 15 seconds of a conversation you missed.

These could give Siri a new kind of personal context. They also raise real privacy concerns, because the people you talk to have not agreed to have their words processed by an AI. The writer suggests that may be why the features have not rolled out yet.

What happens next

The writer expects the next big leap in assistants to come from understanding what you are doing in real time, not just from doing more tasks. Apple's long record on privacy could help it here. The open question is how much people will let an assistant know about them. Apple has not said when the Watch features will arrive.