I’m excited about the new Siri AI. However I’m not feeling the love yet. I’m finding that approximately a quarter to a third of my requests on both my Mac and iPhone produce a spinning white circle as it churns through a list of searches that it’s doing internally, followed by “Sorry, something went wrong. Please try again later.” This happens for simple requests, for complex requests, and too many requests in between. When it works I feel the magic but boy, I really can’t count on it in all the ways that people are gushing about. Is this just my bad luck? I’m running the latest OS and iOS on both my devices: I’m on a MacBook Air M4 chip and an iPhone 16 Pro.
While I’m here, I’d like to ask one other question: if all processing is supposed to happen on device, does anybody know why we need an internet connection for Siri AI to work for things like “tell me what’s on my calendar tomorrow” or “can you pull up the email with my theater tickets”? Is it because none of this really lives on our devices? And if this is true, why is there all the discussion of on-device processing?
Siri AI is a newly released beta that, IMO, is finally delivering on the claims Apple made in 2024. It’s hard to compare it to other digital assistants because it is designed to work with the apps on our devices, not with the world outside of Apple’s walled garden.
The new Siri is just so much better than the old one, especially for world knowledge questions. But I agree, the number of times I hit the “something went wrong” message is surprising given that many of my requests Siri should be able to process on device.
It’s useful to be able to ask simple questions (that are slightly more than old Siri could’ve handled), but when it comes to anything deeper I find I’d have to turn to just regular search or another LLM.
My other beef is for simple things like setting reminders it takes too long or asks unnecessary clarifying questions.
I agree that it’s much slower than previous Siri for certain tasks like timers and dialing numbers I won’t go so far as to say the new Siri is worse. It’s just surprising to me that in certain places it’s falling shorter than before, which is weird.
“Classic” Siri was hard coded like a telephone auto attendant. AFAIK it did not require any decision-making. My guess is every time I asked old Siri to open the Podcast app it followed the same routine every time.
Sometimes I get dumb responses or the inability to open certain apps. But I’ve also found that it does a really good job of searching through mail and messages and notes… It can parse a complex query and come up with a reasonable answer. It is much more useful than the original series.
I’ve had some good experiences with new Siri. I asked it while driving the other day “give me directions to where I rented my canoe from” and she totally did it. I just need to remember to actually ask things she might help me with.
A few weeks ago, I asked Gemini to answer a series of questions about a SOC 2 Attestation report and provided the link.
Gemini told me it couldn’t open the linked file, so it just picked another SOC 2 Attestation report for a completely different vendor and answered the questions about that. No use whatsoever.
I can’t even imagine an intern making that mistake.
Today, I tried to get some help from Siri with evaluating Medicare options. Totally useless. Even Gemini–from which I understand Siri is derived–did a better job. I ended up using ChatGPT, which even in its unpaid version way exceeded my expectations.
With SiriAI there’s no guarantee that data remains
Locally. Unlike when ChatGPT was added, Apple doesn’t ask if it can send data to the cloud (private compute)
I get that Siri is beta and learning, and I too have had many Siri “wins” that show it’s promise. But today I was floored. The battery level on the menu bar is really hard to read so I asked Siri what I can do about it. First response? Ask Siri to tell you the level. So I did, and guess what? Siri said, I’m sorry I can’t do that. I asked: why not? Siri: I can’t do that. I pressed, and finally got this: "I apologize for the frustration. I am currently unable to retrieve your specific battery percentage due to a technical limitation with how I access system settings on your Mac. While I can help you adjust settings like Low Power Mode, I cannot read the live battery level directly right now.
“If you are having trouble reading the small percentage in the menu bar, you can also check your battery level by opening System Settings and clicking on Battery in the sidebar, where a larger graphic and percentage are displayed.”
Nice work Apple! You muck up the display (even with all accessibility, transparency, reduced liquid glass blah blah many things are still hard) and you introduce a super high tech solution to say you can’t help.
