The new Siri AI - it’s amazing and bad

Software
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I think Apple may have shot themselves in the foot with the new Siri AI.

Yes, it’s amazing!

Let me give you an example. I asked it to share the free chapter of a book I’d found online with 4 people who worked for the same client. The chapter was in safari in front of me. I told Siri the company name but not the people. And I asked it to send the link.

It churned away for about 20 seconds, then told me the names of the people and said it had sent them an email. It got the names correct which was fab.

But … it didn’t send the email.

I know this because I checked.

I told it so and it told me it had definitely sent it and to wait a bit for the sent email to appear in my app.

It didn’t appear.

So I checked and it had only created a draft.

I opened the draft and it was (almost) good enough to send!

The names and email addresses were great.

But it didn’t include the link to the page. I added that in then rewrote the message so it sounded like a human sent it, and then I sent it.

This took me 5 or 6 minutes, rather than the 1 minute it would have taken had I’d done it myself.

This isn’t just about time: If I hadn’t checked then my clients would have not received the link. I would have looked like I don’t keep my promises. And I would have resented them for not thanking me. And then, in something reminiscent of a 1970s sitcom, late next week we would have all realised it was just an unfortunate misunderstanding.

So now I’ve learnt that I can’t trust Siri AI and I need to double check everything it does!

This is worse than it was before - though in an amazing and pretty way.

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Another example.

I just asked Siri what time the movie I’m booked into see starts. It said I am seeing Goodfellas at 12am. I’m not. It starts at 630pm. It says so in my diary, which I checked manually. Unfortunately I was demonstrating this in my new Apple Watch so that my wife could see what a good investment it was.

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This isn’t a good start. I’ve got a realfriend who makes all sorts of amazing promises but is flakey and unreliable. I don’t trust anything she promises and I don’t ask her to do anything that’s important. Same with my new Siri AI friend.

So disappointed.

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P.s. I was happy to forgive ChatGPT and Claude for their many mistakes, broke promises and confident lies, back when they were new. It was early days and we were early adopters. It comes with the territory.

But Siri AI is about to become the most mainstream AI in the world and this level of sloppiness is harmful.

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Siri AI is a beta. I’m double checking everything it does for that reason alone. I know Google does not allow Gemini to send emails without confirmation, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple adopted that same safety feature.

Siri AI only runs on-device which will, IMO, severely limit it’s use in most businesses. Right now cloud based Gemini is available to 3 billion+ Google Workspace users and has over 1 billion monthly active users. One hundred million of which are running iOS.

I have no doubt Siri AI will eventually become very popular, but today it is a new hire. And like all newly hired employees needs time and close supervision until it learns its duties. :wink:

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The new Siri is bad. This morning I asked it to make me breakfast, clean the bathrooms and then cut the grass. It did none of those things. Crazy.

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I’m hoping you were being sarcastic!

But, just in case you weren’t: if you’d asked it to do those things, and it said it had, then … you’d probably not trust it the next time it told you to do something, If that happened two times in a row … you’d likely stop using it and think it was useless.

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Just kidding around……I do get a chuckle when I read or hear people talk about AI. I have no need for it and others seem to think they can’t live without it.

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Good take. I had a similar experience.

I have a bunch of lists made for past trips that I want to keep around but don’t want cluttering up Reminders. So I’ve been trying to export them somewhere else then delete them. Yet, for some reason there’s no built-in way to export/backup Reminders lists. You can build a Shortcut or an AppleScript to do this but I was hoping for something off-the-shelf.

Enter Siri AI. It can talk to Reminders and Notes, so it must be able to do this! Hooray!

Except: on the first few tries on a given list, it failed to get more than a quarter of the items in the list, it changed the ordering and grouping of items and subtasks, and it hallucinated the grouping of items.

Ok… so I tried a different approach. I saved the “Print” of the list to a PDF and gave the PDF file to Siri AI with the same task. This time it seemed to get the items, but forgot the grouping. Next it got the grouping but got rid of the complete/incomplete status. Then it got it all right (I think)! So I asked it to take on another list … and in the same conversation, having just completed the task correctly, it completely messed it up on the second list again.

Sigh.

I then gave four such PDFs to Claude and it made a complete and correct backup in Markdown with aplomb.

It’s exactly as @Clarke_Ching put it: these results completely broke my hopes for and trust in this tool.

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Thus far (less than a week), I’ve only used Siri AI to go spelunking through my Messages history, and it’s done a decent job of that as a glorified search and a summarization tool for long group conversations.

Hopefully I’ll find some better and more creative uses for it in the coming weeks.

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If the new Siri had been released a year and a half ago, we would have been impressed. However, having become accustomed to Claude and ChatGPT, while Siri is better, it is no match for the other AIs.

That said, I don’t believe that is Apple’s objective, and I suspect that the majority of their customers don’t care. The ability for Siri to extract information from the device for daily tasks and activities will probably be all that most people care about.

On a positive note, I found myself using Siri to edit extended text and send that text to the Draft app for more editing before transferring it to Ulysses. Siri’s edits avoided most AI words and phrases, which are awful, and consistently sent the text to Drafts. That was unexpectedly impressive.

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I’ve had mixed, but promising results using Siri AI. I mentioned in a different thread that the first time I asked it to enter data from a photo of a business card, it misread a name, and entered totally wrong phone numbers. That was disappointing.

It can be a bit slower performing “old Siri” duties like creating Reminders, and Notes, or playing music using YouTube music. But what I expect to ask of Siri most often is to look up info in my own files.

I only have 256 GB on my devices and keep my email, contacts, calendar, and most of my files on Google Drive. Siri has access to some of this through Mail.app, Contacts.app, and Calendar.app. And it also has access to several thousand pdfs, eBooks, videos, and notes, etc. that I’ve shared with iCloud. I did this so I could use the same files with Siri AI and Gemini on all my devices.

Yesterday I asked Siri when I purchased my Jeep. About 30 seconds later it responded:

"Based on an Odometer Disclosure Statement from . . . Lincoln Mercury, you acquired your Jeep Cherokee on December 29, 1998, which is likely when it was first registered to you.The document lists the vehicle as an 1995 Jeep Cherokee 4-Door Sport Utility with the VIN xxxxxxx . . . "

Not bad, IMO.

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Ironically, I had just finished listening to this week’s MPU praising Siri AI and saw this thread.

Two things come to mind - they mentioned the disclaimer that Siri adds that warns results may not be correct, and they mentioned that everyone assumes Siri is so bad they don’t even try anything with Siri much.

All good points.

On a serious philosophical level (is that the right word?), perhaps the biggest benefit of AI in general is finally teaching all of us, including the clueless public, to not trust anything we read, hear, or see - in person or online.

If deepfakes and other manipulative uses of AI lose their effectiveness because no one believes anything anymore, maybe that is a good thing?

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I understand your point, but I would hate to think that we, our children, and our grandchildren must live in a state of constant mistrust and cynicism. That is a terrible way to live. I refuse.

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For me, this has been the most frustrating change with using Siri AI. I ask Siri all the time to add reminders, send text messages, start timers, set alarms, etc. The delay the new Siri adds is driving me nuts. At this point, I’m inclined to go back to using old one.

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I’m finding it pretty interesting how and when it accesses data and when it deosn’t realize it should explore more of the on-device data to answer.

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I understand. But my suggestion is, don’t judge an app by it’s beta.

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Can you do that? Does turning off Apple AI achieve that?

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It’s not a beta any more (even though perhaps it should be)

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I was able to turn off new Siri this summer for a bit by changing my phone’s language to another English region. When I changed it back, I just had to re-index. Might still work.

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This seems to be the best solution at present to maintain privacy on iOS 27 - I understand there is an equivalent choice on Golden Gate.

Turn Off This 1 iOS 27 Setting Right Away. Apple Can Retain The Data For 2…

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Agreed, but rather than cynicism, I see it as more of a pendulum swing.

We (collective society) perhaps have become too trusting of everything, “the computer is always right”, and thus need a major swing in the other direction to ultimately find a happy medium in the median?