Siri was the first widely available AI bot but they forgot to open it to developers. The ecosystem would have grown a million fold in all these years
Never underestimate the power of a bored programmer
Siri turn on the lights
Siri code a Doom clone in Swift
Siri design a landing page for a Consulting Agency
Siri summarize the latest news about AI
Siri find a solution to the Riemann hypothesis
Now that's an agent I'd use. Can we start with Siri for the terminal?
Amazon did exactly this with Alexa skills and it hasn’t exactly been a booming success. Turns out that all of the things you listed as examples are stuff that most consumers don’t actually want or will use.
“AI as a chat bot” has always been cool and fun in sci-fi movies, but it’s the least imaginative real world use for it. We need to move past it.
> $ Siri 'List the files in this folder'
Why in the world would I ever use this instead of just ‘ls’?
> Turns out that all of the things you listed as examples are stuff that most consumers don’t actually want or will use.
I've never understood this obsession with trying to invent the talking ship computer from Star Trek TNG. The purpose of the talking computer in the series was not to be a "cool 24th century technology advancement". It was a plot device to keep the story going and explain things to the audience. Having a voice conversation with a computer is terrible, imprecise, plodding UX. It's not a good interface, it's not a good invention, it's not good technology. Yet $billions are being spent to try to invent it.
Disagree. The TNG computer was used via voice input when it was efficient to do so, which is exactly how it should be. There were plenty of computer consoles, laptops, and tricorders/phone-like devices that were also used, especially with certain types of tasks. The crew could technically fly the ship and fire weapons via voice commands, but that only happened occasionally, in situations where it made sense. Also, when Picard wants to record himself playing a musical instrument, saying “Computer, begin recording” is simply convenient. It serves no purpose to the story or explaining anything to the audience. It’s just a tool. One that I would very much like to have.
The best example I can think of in favor of what you are saying, where the computer does kind of serve the story and helps the audience, is the episode where Doctor Crusher gets stuck in the warp bubble and she has a lot of conversations with the computer about what is happening. But even then, she is out of her element, needs a lot of help from the computer, and it seems more convenient to do so via voice than anything else. She still travels to different areas of the ship to carry out actions, even though she probably doesn’t have to in case. The computer is clearly at its best for simple actions and answering questions, even if it can do more. The characters understand that and use the technology accordingly.
You should check out all of the voices available on macOS. They still have the original, robotic sounding MacinTalk voices from 1984, such as Fred. They’re fun to play with.
Personally, I think Majel Barrett is my favorite computer voice of all time.
You don't have to do it all the time as your primary interface.
My wife asks Siri questions all the time while she's busy.
"Siri, what's the time?", "Siri what will the temperature be in four hours?" etc.
It's not "terrible", it's pretty smart.
Alexa's big issue for me was that you had to remember very specific commands and unless you remembered the exact syntax you were out of luck. I genuinely think if the AI had been better and had been able to interpret commands better, skills would have been infinitely more useful.
Amazon and I guess Siri's original design was completely undiscoverable. Both had limited vocabulary and actions you could take. I had to learn from others what I could even ask the devices. Also both were audio only and for things like, "turn on the lights" that required talking to cheap 3rd party devices that barely stay connected, it was frustrating.
Instead of quickly iterating to find how to take voice to the next level, both projects quickly locked in on whatever that was and became too costly to pivot.
I think you have the wrong conclusion with Alexa’s skills and ecosystem, as a prior heavily bought-in Alexa user myself. It did feel like magic in the beginning and was a quality of life improvement if you automated repetitive task of daily life e.g. auto light/thermostat activation.
I never needed it to add stuff to my Amazon shopping cart or interpret things I said as voice shopping asks, which was a terrible UX.
There were so many other daily frustrations and Alexa skills that were half baked and random frequently resetting or going offline. Another frustration was Alexa failing to recognize the magic incantation to activate a simple action in the day to day when skills had overlapping utterances.
I actually wished Siri had better HomeKit IoT products so I could switch over, but I just gave up out of death by a thousand cuts wearing me down over the years and do everything manually now. Privacy and surveillance was also a huge tipping point to make me bin all my Alexa devices. I digress…
The problem with Alexa is that by the time it appeared anywhere other than Echo devices, it was already deeply enshittified. Siri is in your pocket, on your wrist, and in your ears. Alexa was stuck on your kitchen counter asking you if you wanted to try Amazon Music.
Granny: "cobolcomesback, what's that command I have to write in this black box thingee to list all the files in this folder"
cobolcomesback: "ls, granny"
Granny: "it said No such file or directory"
cobolcomesback: "no, that's... just write ls, granny.
Granny: "I wrote ls granny it said no such file or directory."
cobolcomesback: "just.. from now on... just write Siri 'list all files in this directory', granny"
Granny: "I wrote siri list all files in this directory granny and it told me all the files and then it also asked me who's granny and I told it and it said nice to meet you"
> “AI as a chat bot” has always been cool and fun in sci-fi movies, but it’s the least imaginative real world use for it.
Most consumers don't understand the possibilities of this technology. They have been trained their whole lives, starting with K-12 government school that they work within the boxes they are given, that they do what they are told to at work and stay within the box, that Windows computer is a box they work within and cannot really change, that the iPhone they have has limits that they cannot go outside of, the apps they use, etc, etc.
The concept of "I use this app daily and I love it but these things bother me, so I'm going to ask Claude to find the source code, and build in the features and then push the new app to my phone" is something that doesn't even cross people's minds of 95% of the population. It's currently a niche thing that's being taken advantage of by tech nerds that live in the space, but it will slowly trickle down to more of the population over the next decade.
> Turns out that all of the things you listed as examples are stuff that most consumers don’t actually want or will use.
The thing that nobody really realized is that setup is a big factor that isn't worth to a lot of people. For example, to turn off lights with Alexa, you have to do a whole bunch of setup that involves installing special lights, installing app, connecting the app to Alexa. Even though relatively this is simple, its just not worth the effort to a lot of people.
Amazon or Apple could easily overcome this by offering Alexa or Siri connected devices as incentive to builders building houses or apartments. That way, when you plug in Alexa in your new apartment, it can auto detect everything it can control including lights, thermostat appliances, e.t.c.
It is an extremely powerful tool, but here are the basics:
# Ask the default on-device model
fm respond 'Explain this shell error in plain English: permission denied'
# Start a conversation
fm chat --instructions 'Let's talk about economics.'
# Use the larger Private Cloud Compute model
fm respond --model pcc 'Are zebras and horses related?'
# Pipe stuff to a model
echo 'What is Swift?' | fm respond
I'd settle for a siri that can at least turn the lights off properly.
Google assistant on the nvidia shield left Siri in the dust years ago. Siri can't even chain basic commands in your smart home, it can't retain any kind of context (e.g. dim the lights...a bit more).
Just today running latest developers beta, I asked Siri to turn on the coffee machine and it started playing some song instead. I found out later that I had named the switch coffee machine plug.
Similar thing happens when I ask Siri to play my favorite songs and it starts to play a song named favorite from my library
I gave up on using Siri for my lights because 1/3 of the time it would get caught in a “who is speaking? Please go through the voice configuration to identify yourself.”
This was frustrating for me as it always prompted “who cares? Just turn off the lights.” As well as would drive my parents and other guests batty.
> This was frustrating for me as it always prompted “who cares? Just turn off the lights.”
I guess you should be able to create a bucket of low-risk tasks that require zero authentication, like letting your guests turn off the lights. I do get why they are cautious, though, because in some cases this could be a security risk, like a burglar turning off lights from outside the home.
Siri is Gemini now (Semeni?) so expect similar stories from both major phone OS providers going forward, since we have lost more diversity in the mobile market (seems anti-trustworthy to me)
I hate to do this, but I decided to "search" google for "gemiri" just to see, and was presented with
---
AI Overview
The term "gemiri" is relatively rare and can refer to a few entirely different things depending on the context.
Tech Slang (Gemini + Siri): It is a modern, informal portmanteau used by tech enthusiasts on social platforms like X (formerly Twitter). It describes a hypothetical or user-modified pairing of Google's Gemini AI with Apple's Siri assistant.
Medical / Cancer Regimen: In oncology, GemIri is a shorthand medical code for a combination chemotherapy regimen consisting of Gemcitabine and Irinotecan
I tried "turn off the lights in [room a] and [room b]" in the new Siri app and rather than Siri saying they can't do compound commands they just turned off the lights in one of the two rooms listed.
So, progress?
Any agent with the Home Assistant MCP hooked up can do it fine.
$ Siri 'rename this thousand of photos in these folders describing their content and make sure to use the same name for duplicates regardless of their size'
Yes and even further, Apple added an LLM into iPhone 17s and higher but their terms of use forbid a wide number of categories of queries on it. Which means it can’t be prompted directly by any users.
Okay let me just install a tool to do that because the OS doesn't usually have it built in in 2026.
Oh, it's riddled with ads. Oh it's paid for. Etc.
It's the same thing with the recent opening of knowledge thanks to AI.
Before: search for recipe with search riddled with ads, find website riddled with ads cookies notification requests forced sign up and a million other dark patterns, then an entire fucking life story before the recipe.
Now: "find me a good recipe for pasta that uses the stuff I have left over from the party last weekend, I don't mind buying a few more bits".
> Okay let me just install a tool to do that because the OS doesn't usually have it built in in 2026.
On Mac select the PDFs in Finder. Right click on the selected files to bring up the context menu. Select "Create a PDF" from the Quick Actions submenu.
This works with PDF files and image files as inputs.
The thing is, Apple will have never lost this opportunity. The distribution advantage of the user base is so deep they can basically always implement this at will.
It’d be short sighted to not have a wrapper around which AI to use, even without implementation for them. Like, having an abstract parent class with a Siri implementation of it would be baseline good software engineering.
Yeah; plus we know they're designing with potential future local-only Vs. hybrid Vs. cloud-only in mind depending on hardware/market changes. So having it be this flexible buys them a ton of future potential.
People have speculated that with FPGAs or even an ASIC you could take some smaller models we have today, turn the chip into essentially that model-as-hardware, and get some really compelling performance/power-usage characteristics.
At that point running a GOOD quantized Q8 model on a phone is not beyond the realm.
This is such a funny comment. I’d been hearing about the un-repairability of Apple products for years and I believed it. Then I went to Shenzhen and walked past an entire floor of individuals doing all sorts of “impossible” repairs right in front of the customer.
My speculation: "impossible" repairs work a lot better when you buy replacements parts for near-market price from a competitively priced seller next door, rather than having to order your parts online from one of a handful of distributors substantially upcharging even for the off-brand version.
I’m not even sure how they would implement these features without them being interoperable. All the AI systems use pretty similar if not identical API standards.
And you can also sideload apps (only in the EU), change you default navigation app from apple maps (only in the EU), and use more features of the NFC reader (only in the EU).
The code for all of those things is there, but not enabled if for most iOS users. There's a non-zero chance this code is there for Apple to try and convince the EU to let them release a Siri AI, and then just like sideloading have some impossible-to-actually-use alternative path to make the DMA happy.
Apple can hold the AI customers hostage by locking this level of AI integration to their app store, taking a 30% cut of AI subscriptions while at the same time having someone else fix the reputation of their devices' voice assistant for them.
There's profit to be made by offering customers choices here, I'm sure Apple will be ready to scoop up all of those delicious slop dollars.
This is a very clever platform play. If you make Siri / your mac the central access point for all AI related workflows and make models interchangeable, then Apple has a huge weapon in the AI race.
I don't disagree, but I do feel the need to point out this was not Apple's plan A. Luckily for them they have so many tools and options at their disposal, that they are able to massively fail at developing their own models and still end up in a good position.
Apple “genius” has been to accept their plan A failed (the original Apple Intelligence), and instead of doubling down, let the others explore the space, then offer a good interface (I say that, I haven’t seen if it’s actually good).
So many other actors in the industry would have just doubled down and follow the race to the bottom
I imagine that Google assistant only makes money for Google because they’re an advertising company. Alexa loses money for Amazon and it’s becoming more gated to Prime subscription features as a result. Amazon thought everyone would be buying stuff with their voice and that future never panned out.
It turns out that voice assistants aren’t all that important. Customers aren’t willing to pay for them and they’re more of a nice to have convenience feature.
They didn’t invest in Siri and became the most valuable company in history. I don’t think Siri being better would have mattered much to be honest. Not joining the financial black hole that is AI training seems to have benefited them well so far. But yes, it’s definitely a case of failing upwards.
Adding quotes around “genius” as it seems you misunderstood what I meant
What a way to go falling upward with Apple Silicon, five Operating systems, and five ecosystems. In comparison to their competition who are all currently burning billions of dollars.
Their advantage is they are the last vertical computer from the 1980's.
One problem they do have memory will need to come in house.
Meh, AI is deep in it's diversification stage -- there are soooooooo many players in the game right now and basically one maybe two will survive once the dust settles. All these frontier labs are fighting tooth and nail to be the one left standing. Apple is making a measured approach saying "hey, we're probably not going to be the Google of AI, but the smartest thing for us to do is to put infrastructure in place so that once there is a contraction (which there will be, think the search engine landscape in the 2000s) we're relatively ahead for relatively little effort/cost."
So basically do what they have always done for decades?
Apple Intelligence was an outlier in how they historically operate. I mean they literally just put out a folding phone after waiting what, a decade, for others to perfect it first.
Yep. I will never understand why none of their competitors follow that strategy. It’s good we have first movers ready to take some risk Apple has shown over and over again how well their approach to product works. Wait for the market to be discovered and the technology to mature, then enter with a clear vision and high quality product
How can you perfect it when you don't have control of an effective in house operating system or in house chip design. When the dust settles Apple will be number 1 or 1A and number 1 in hardware/software integration.
Are you serious. As a left handed person apparently I'm like a witch or something and can't use Apple's folding phone anyway.
You call that perfect?
And by your logic where do you draw the line. Apple do not have control over TSMC's internal processes. Or Samsung who make the display for them. So your statements reek of culty faff than objective truths.
It’s a very low risk and low effort plan, even if it fails it’s fine. To be contrasted with all the AI players accumulating costs and risks for the AI rollout
I don't know why you're getting downvoted. You're spot on.
Almost everyone developing their own AI is doomed to fail. I would not be surprised that when the dust settles, Microsoft CoPilot and Google Gemini will be left standing while OpenAI and Anthropic fade away. They will get what they need and then throw them away.
"Embrace, extend, extinguish" is the same playbook for decades, and you can only do that when you make money. Yes, making money still matters and post-capitalism is a big fat lie.
Copilot is part of the enterprise suite, so like everything else Microsoft does in that regard it's never been anything but a roaring success by its own definition.
Of course that's relative to how these kinds of things are used, but it really does get used. It might be the best feature of MS Teams.
Copilot is the cockroach of corporate AI. It ain't going nowhere.
Handle the query on device. If the device cannot handle the query, push the query to Private Cloud, If Private Cloud cannot handle the query, push the query to a third party of the users choosing.
Which is pretty much the same as what they announced a few years ago.
Apple underestimated the amount of time and work needed to get to work and really the only bit that I think changed is that Private Cloud (and possibly the on device model) is a white label Google model rather than being developed in-house by Apple.
The problem with that approach is that “how do I handle this query”, and “did I handle that query ok” are both AI-hard problems, and must be tackled near the user, where the large model is not.
It also requires a relatively complex distributed architecture.
I worry about how successful they can be with this approach, in terms of best user experience.
I’ve been thinking recently about moving my notes from Notes.app to e.g. Notion because the latter jacks into ChatGPT and Claude, thereby giving them way more power as a personal assistant. This is the exact kind of move that would keep someone like me locked in.
My favorite Siri behavior is telling it, on my phone, to turn on a focus state only for it to transfer the request to a nearby HomePod that tells me it can't help with that. I hope the new changes to it are an improvement, but the bar is currently buried in the dirt.
Mark Gurman seems to get extraordinarily accurate and detailed leaks. I wonder how Apple got this leaky. Pretty much everything about the Duo was known months in advance.
Well, either corporate security got incompetent or they intentionally let select leaks exist to "test the market response". Established companies tend to get more risk averse overtime.
That’s actually a good solution. Create a platform where app actions can be invoked with a permission model by any AI model.
Maybe apple can even have something similar to MCPs for tool invocations of apps and publish it so all models can actually be trained to use that framework
I actually think this is what they ended up doing - just regular conversations with tool calling into your various apps, behind a Siri AI API. not HTTP based mcps (for now) but rather local ones.
Once Siri gets MCP support, it’ll be my main orchestrator.
I built an app that lets me run terminals on my MacBook. It’s a Next app so I can go to that website on my phone using Tailscale. It has a built-in MCP server, so I can connect it to ChatGPT and have it create terminal sessions, orchestrate terminal sessions, all that good stuff.
Down the line, I’d like to be able to connect it to Siri and just talk to my phone and it can control terminal sessions and projects that I’m working on on my laptop.
I'd love it if Siri does, but I don't expect big corps to keep supporting MCP since MCP gives so much control to the end user, can't charge for eg. Google integration when someone can just add an MCP to handle it.
I pray for the possibility of not only choosing the provider, but being able to choose the thinking level.
I've been using the new siri, and it seems more or less stuck in instant-answer mode, which gives really terrible answers with any provider.
I wish more people were talking about this, but if you can't crank up the models to extended thinking, the technology is more or less stuck at 2004 levels of usefulness.
Apple Foundations Models Framework already aimed towards some generalized API for models. Personally I like it, just as I would be a little happier if instead of codex/claude/antigravity (rip gemini cli) I would have single standardized interface.
With mobile devices especially where ideally models could be shared across several apps.
But this specific code I'd assume is targeted to comply with EU regulations more than anything.
OT:
Since I've moved to Spain my principal Apple account is still in my home country but I've made another one for local app-store (since some local apps aren't available if you're not in the Spanish store).
iPhone is acting really strange, I'm logged to my principal account for iCloud+ and anything and local App Store.
If I log back to my principal account, I loose HCE mode and my building NFC app stops working until I re-log in the Spanish Apple Store.
If I'm logged at the Spanish account, I loose Siri AI which is blocked in the EU...
I think that's the end goal, at least looking at where their hardware is going. Or flexible routing with easy tasks running locally and only the more complex ones hitting the cloud
Third-party calls won't eat into Apple's compute, so it's not entirely against the interests of Apple as they put caps on people's AI use.
I wonder what the margin on this stuff is for them:
Some Apple Intelligence features in the Home app, such as
video summaries, are available for a limited number of
cameras depending on your iCloud+ plan — up to 1 camera
in the 2 TB plan, up to 2 cameras in the 6 TB plan, and
up to 5 cameras in the 12 TB plan. Supported camera
counts and other iCloud+ plan features may change over time.
Quite annoying that you need to get the top plan for 5 cameras, and you cannot get more.
I like tinkering with this stuff, everything around me is a perpetual lab, so I have more than 5 cameras that I'd like to hook up to this. But I REALLY don't NEED or WANT 12TB or storage.
I want all of these integrations to be possible locally, without having to send my data to the cloud.
But I cannot. A lot of these nice integrations aren't offered for fully-local setups.
I don't want to tell Siri to ask Claude or GPT - I want Siri to automatically delegate to another model of my choice when it can't answer something, instead of showing irrelevant web searches.
Seems Apple's first attempt AI failing two years ago is turning into a blessing. Now they can buy AI as a commodity from the cheapest supplier. Well played.
This appears to be the current feature prototype intended for the EU and potentially China. Apple has chosen not to release the new Siri AI in the EU because our Digital Markets Act requires them to allow interoperability. I.e. that users be allowed to choose another AI provider.
Ostensibly they'll activate this in the EU when it's ready. Given the current functionality, it looks ready (or close to being ready). My guess is it is ready and Apple is doing their usual negotiation tactics with the EU to see who blinks first.
My secret hope is that Tim Cook was the main weight behind cutting off half the new features from Apple software in the EU an attempt to weaponize their users against legislators. Even features that have had analogues where nobody would've ever asked for interoperability (i.e. Handoff/Continuity exists in the EU, but iPhone mirroring doesn't)
Apple proposed a solution to the EU after reportedly extensive talks and asked the EU if it would satisfy them.
The EU said “build it then we’ll tell you”, which is crazy.
The problem is not having Siri use different models beneath. That’s not what the EU wants. They want Siri to be replaced by Gemini/etc completely. Which fits with the DMA.
Apple’s proposal was for something akin to an agent that could gather the necessary data for the 3rd party AI to use. Because what they refused to do is let any other AI have unfettered access to everything whenever it wants.
So I suspect this is really for Apple’s benefit. I don’t think the EU would be happy if you could still use Siri, but it was grok underneath. Because that would still be Siri.
> Apple proposed a solution to the EU after reportedly extensive talks and asked the EU if it would satisfy them. The EU said “build it then we’ll tell you”, which is crazy.
This is what Apple claims and I don’t think you should believe it at face value. The EU has an entire team working on negotiating the boundaries with gatekeepers. They have a vested interested in compliance. Apple’s claims don’t sound credible.
The DMA requires interoperability so it requires being able to swap out Siri - completely. Competitors would need to be first class components with full system access. Apple has a long history of anti-competitive action in iOS. For example, Apple doesn’t allow full system cloud backup competition. One must use iCloud or it’s impossible to back up an iPhone over the air.
I side with competition and choice. If people want to use something other than iCloud, or Siri, they should be allowed to do that with their own hardware.
> The DMA requires interoperability so it requires being able to swap out Siri - completely
I fully agree. But Apple is not willing to do that, and I don’t blame them. I actually think they’re right on that one personally, even though it would be a conflict with the law.
One can imagine a scenario where 1) this requires a Claude or ChatGPT subscription, 2) this subscription needs to be purchased through the iOS app. AI providers get new users, Apple gets its App Store tax, everyone wins.
In my opinion the OS should broker the communication between harnesses (which is part of Siri), LLMs and app functionality. It can take into account the permissions, the user could configure which LLM to use at an OS system settings level and complex workflows can integrate permissions like FaceID only once as the harness then interacts with APIs exposed by applications (arguably already there with app intents).
Feels like this is based on the idea that any model is interchangeable with any other, while all of them are better at some stuff, worse at some stuff.
Besides, the modern concept of "agent" is what, some year old? Bit fast to ossify stuff in the OSes already.
Agreed. I'm not looking forward to iOS 27 where basically the only option is this new Siri. I was perfectly content with using the old "dumb" Siri to set timers, turn on a light and control my Apple TV and nothing else.
This is not what EU regulators asked for. They want first class access to user data and devices for would-be alternative providers… which Apple simply won’t allow outside PCC.
This is not that. This is expanding the Extensions that you already have. You can look at it in your Settings already.
All of which is why EU users are being left behind on the new Apple Intelligence (for now).
Also given that PCC is just marketing speak for "Apple pinky promise they don't read or share the data", it would be nice to get an API with first class access to my own data. So tired of being locked it.
You can download an app that does that. You don’t have to use Siri, and it can be turned off entirely, or decoupled from AI entirely, and the wake word can be disabled entirely. A lot of options are available.
Make a Shortcut that will open your local voice assistant app of choice when you press the action button.
If this consistently has happened at every place you've worked in your career, I think you're luckier than you realize. Independent of the implementation, it's also still interesting as a sign of what might be supported for users down the line; I don't agree that this is how they'd write the code if they never expected to allow another provider, and other comments in the thread have already provided some insight into what the context might be (e.g. EU market).
Apple had enough experience relying on and being screwed by third parties that they have a built-in allergy to it. They do not like being boxed in and always want to be in control of their destiny.
This would’ve been useful during their bake off where they were trying to choose if they wanted to go with Google, Anthropic, or OpenAI. But even without that, they would absolutely not want to be in a situation where they had to redo everything to get off a bad partner.
They are currently getting rid of Qualcomm modems the new fold iPhone is using an Apple in house modem (C2) and due to market conditions Apple will probably have to do something with memory because of the three head cartel and the Chinese.
Apple has a long and contentious relationship with Qualcomm, and Qualcomm is big enough and important enough Apple couldn’t bully them into doing what they want.
I think it makes a lot of sense for Apple to control their own destiny there. It’s let them focus on the things they care about like power efficiency and tighter integration.
DRAM is a complete commodity. I don’t think making their own makes any sense. They don’t make their own screws. Although the reaction from iFixit would be hilarious. If Apple makes their own DRAM I don’t see how it would be any different from what SK Hynix sells.
The useful thing would be fabbing it since that’s the bottleneck. But that commits them to the insanity of running their own fabs and keeping them up-to-date and on the bleeding edge forever.
And even if they want to do that, they’d have to buy all the experienced people, the ASML machines that I assume are spoken for for the next few years, etc.
What does a full integration of claude or openAI models into the phone even mean? What additional functionality can one get and what are those use cases? Does it actually pull in more users to the voice/Siri interface? I mean even with vastly superior models, does it move the needle enough to attract more users?
They could instead make a good assumption that you'll search the web, open the Yelp or OpenTable app. Take your phone to your favorite restaurant and/or pay with a credit card at the grocery store.
If you walk to a taco truck without your phone and pay with cash, you probably don’t do that every time and you generate enough data through other means to be accurately advertised to.
There’s a reason everyone knows the various wake words.
All the big companies know how suicidal that would be. They already get accused of it by people who don’t understand how targeted web advertising works.
Some of the new AI start-ups don’t seem to understand that, but Apple absolutely will not make a mistake that stupid.
No what I was trying to say is it’s not listening for anything it can sell ads against, it’s set to trigger on a specific word. The rest of the phone has no idea you’re talking until the processor recognizes the water word (possibly by mistake) and then (I assume) raises an interrupt.
I’m not claiming benevolence. Apple is less benevolent now than ever, however much you think that was.
They care about money. And I think they care about selling $1000 phones + tie ins far more than small amounts from advertising on all their phones by surveilling what people are talking about and risking those sales.
Trust me. They’re already shoving ads everywhere without that, much to my annoyance.
Apple is highly sensitive to dangers to its reputation. They would nuke any service that seemed to be spying on users, just like they revoked Facebook's cert back in 2019 over the same issue.
Just playing the devil advocate: what happens when the answers from a not-Apple LLM are garbage? Who the users are going to blame, Apple or OpenAI, Anthropic, etc..?
I'm not 100% on Apple side on this, I would love to chose whatever I want, even local models, but I get why trey trying to control 100% of the user experience. If they could trust any provider with customers data, they would let them in, since they're not competitors. They would even let Apple not spend a ton of money on developing LLMs....
Are people blaming Apple when Google search in Safari gives garbage results? Some probably are, but that really shouldn’t be a relevant discussion, in particular when the user explicitly chose which AI backend to use.
I don't think your example fit this scenario: when you search things in google, you know you are using google.
When you ask Siri to do something and the answer is garbage, where the issue lies? It's Siri not giving the right context? It's Siri that is not providing the correct tools to the LLM? Or it's the LLM that botched it?
We already see these kind of issue with LLM and harness, and we are talking with developers that "should" know how to move in this scenario ;)
Well, we can generalize this a bit to model routing in general. Actually, just AI in general - even when directly interacting with GPT we haven't figured out good protocols yet.
See my comment above: unfortunately Siri and the LLM provider are interwiven, there is not clear cut border between the two, even for experienced users
I can promise you Apple is constantly being blamed by its customers for things out of its control. I worked at an Apple store for years. All sorts of carrier issues, third party accessories, and app problems were chalked up to Apple screwing up.
Siri was the first widely available AI bot but they forgot to open it to developers. The ecosystem would have grown a million fold in all these years
Never underestimate the power of a bored programmer
Now that's an agent I'd use. Can we start with Siri for the terminal?$ Siri 'List the files in this folder'
Amazon did exactly this with Alexa skills and it hasn’t exactly been a booming success. Turns out that all of the things you listed as examples are stuff that most consumers don’t actually want or will use.
“AI as a chat bot” has always been cool and fun in sci-fi movies, but it’s the least imaginative real world use for it. We need to move past it.
> $ Siri 'List the files in this folder'
Why in the world would I ever use this instead of just ‘ls’?
> Turns out that all of the things you listed as examples are stuff that most consumers don’t actually want or will use.
I've never understood this obsession with trying to invent the talking ship computer from Star Trek TNG. The purpose of the talking computer in the series was not to be a "cool 24th century technology advancement". It was a plot device to keep the story going and explain things to the audience. Having a voice conversation with a computer is terrible, imprecise, plodding UX. It's not a good interface, it's not a good invention, it's not good technology. Yet $billions are being spent to try to invent it.
Disagree. The TNG computer was used via voice input when it was efficient to do so, which is exactly how it should be. There were plenty of computer consoles, laptops, and tricorders/phone-like devices that were also used, especially with certain types of tasks. The crew could technically fly the ship and fire weapons via voice commands, but that only happened occasionally, in situations where it made sense. Also, when Picard wants to record himself playing a musical instrument, saying “Computer, begin recording” is simply convenient. It serves no purpose to the story or explaining anything to the audience. It’s just a tool. One that I would very much like to have.
The best example I can think of in favor of what you are saying, where the computer does kind of serve the story and helps the audience, is the episode where Doctor Crusher gets stuck in the warp bubble and she has a lot of conversations with the computer about what is happening. But even then, she is out of her element, needs a lot of help from the computer, and it seems more convenient to do so via voice than anything else. She still travels to different areas of the ship to carry out actions, even though she probably doesn’t have to in case. The computer is clearly at its best for simple actions and answering questions, even if it can do more. The characters understand that and use the technology accordingly.
The TOS computer was better, it had a better computer-like voice.
You should check out all of the voices available on macOS. They still have the original, robotic sounding MacinTalk voices from 1984, such as Fred. They’re fun to play with.
Personally, I think Majel Barrett is my favorite computer voice of all time.
I exclusively use Siri to start timers and alarms. The UX for voice for some actions can actually be the best UX for something.
This might be my only use for it. I use it exactly twice a day for bloom and steep for French press.
But it does that quite well.
You don't have to do it all the time as your primary interface. My wife asks Siri questions all the time while she's busy. "Siri, what's the time?", "Siri what will the temperature be in four hours?" etc. It's not "terrible", it's pretty smart.
Alexa's big issue for me was that you had to remember very specific commands and unless you remembered the exact syntax you were out of luck. I genuinely think if the AI had been better and had been able to interpret commands better, skills would have been infinitely more useful.
Amazon and I guess Siri's original design was completely undiscoverable. Both had limited vocabulary and actions you could take. I had to learn from others what I could even ask the devices. Also both were audio only and for things like, "turn on the lights" that required talking to cheap 3rd party devices that barely stay connected, it was frustrating.
Instead of quickly iterating to find how to take voice to the next level, both projects quickly locked in on whatever that was and became too costly to pivot.
I think you have the wrong conclusion with Alexa’s skills and ecosystem, as a prior heavily bought-in Alexa user myself. It did feel like magic in the beginning and was a quality of life improvement if you automated repetitive task of daily life e.g. auto light/thermostat activation.
I never needed it to add stuff to my Amazon shopping cart or interpret things I said as voice shopping asks, which was a terrible UX.
There were so many other daily frustrations and Alexa skills that were half baked and random frequently resetting or going offline. Another frustration was Alexa failing to recognize the magic incantation to activate a simple action in the day to day when skills had overlapping utterances.
I actually wished Siri had better HomeKit IoT products so I could switch over, but I just gave up out of death by a thousand cuts wearing me down over the years and do everything manually now. Privacy and surveillance was also a huge tipping point to make me bin all my Alexa devices. I digress…
The problem is with Alexa itself, it fucking sucks to use and is very annoying with advertisements and such
The problem with Alexa is that by the time it appeared anywhere other than Echo devices, it was already deeply enshittified. Siri is in your pocket, on your wrist, and in your ears. Alexa was stuck on your kitchen counter asking you if you wanted to try Amazon Music.
> Siri is in your pocket, on your wrist, and in your ears
and more often than not isn't reliable unless you have a midwestern US accent.
Siri wasn't good. It still isn't good. Apple hasn't delivered on its promises with it and that's why it's being replaced with Gemini.
Granny: "cobolcomesback, what's that command I have to write in this black box thingee to list all the files in this folder"
cobolcomesback: "ls, granny"
Granny: "it said No such file or directory"
cobolcomesback: "no, that's... just write ls, granny.
Granny: "I wrote ls granny it said no such file or directory."
cobolcomesback: "just.. from now on... just write Siri 'list all files in this directory', granny"
Granny: "I wrote siri list all files in this directory granny and it told me all the files and then it also asked me who's granny and I told it and it said nice to meet you"
cobolcomesback: "SIGH"
> “AI as a chat bot” has always been cool and fun in sci-fi movies, but it’s the least imaginative real world use for it.
Most consumers don't understand the possibilities of this technology. They have been trained their whole lives, starting with K-12 government school that they work within the boxes they are given, that they do what they are told to at work and stay within the box, that Windows computer is a box they work within and cannot really change, that the iPhone they have has limits that they cannot go outside of, the apps they use, etc, etc.
The concept of "I use this app daily and I love it but these things bother me, so I'm going to ask Claude to find the source code, and build in the features and then push the new app to my phone" is something that doesn't even cross people's minds of 95% of the population. It's currently a niche thing that's being taken advantage of by tech nerds that live in the space, but it will slowly trickle down to more of the population over the next decade.
distribution. MacBooks are everywhere and already used by devs
> Turns out that all of the things you listed as examples are stuff that most consumers don’t actually want or will use.
The thing that nobody really realized is that setup is a big factor that isn't worth to a lot of people. For example, to turn off lights with Alexa, you have to do a whole bunch of setup that involves installing special lights, installing app, connecting the app to Alexa. Even though relatively this is simple, its just not worth the effort to a lot of people.
Amazon or Apple could easily overcome this by offering Alexa or Siri connected devices as incentive to builders building houses or apartments. That way, when you plug in Alexa in your new apartment, it can auto detect everything it can control including lights, thermostat appliances, e.t.c.
> Can we start with Siri for the terminal?
It already exists in macOS 27: fm(1)
It is an extremely powerful tool, but here are the basics:
I realized my piping stuff example wasn't good enough. Here's a better one:
fm = Foundation Models
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/334/
This, this is it! Oh boy, here starts the joy...
$ alias siri=fm
$ siri 'Hello darkness my old friend...'
I'd settle for a siri that can at least turn the lights off properly.
Google assistant on the nvidia shield left Siri in the dust years ago. Siri can't even chain basic commands in your smart home, it can't retain any kind of context (e.g. dim the lights...a bit more).
Just today running latest developers beta, I asked Siri to turn on the coffee machine and it started playing some song instead. I found out later that I had named the switch coffee machine plug. Similar thing happens when I ask Siri to play my favorite songs and it starts to play a song named favorite from my library
I gave up on using Siri for my lights because 1/3 of the time it would get caught in a “who is speaking? Please go through the voice configuration to identify yourself.”
This was frustrating for me as it always prompted “who cares? Just turn off the lights.” As well as would drive my parents and other guests batty.
> This was frustrating for me as it always prompted “who cares? Just turn off the lights.”
I guess you should be able to create a bucket of low-risk tasks that require zero authentication, like letting your guests turn off the lights. I do get why they are cautious, though, because in some cases this could be a security risk, like a burglar turning off lights from outside the home.
That’s the weird part. For me it used to work very well, then after some update it just stopped. Typical Apple.
Siri is Gemini now (Semeni?) so expect similar stories from both major phone OS providers going forward, since we have lost more diversity in the mobile market (seems anti-trustworthy to me)
Gemiri, clearly
I hate to do this, but I decided to "search" google for "gemiri" just to see, and was presented with
---
AI Overview
The term "gemiri" is relatively rare and can refer to a few entirely different things depending on the context.
Tech Slang (Gemini + Siri): It is a modern, informal portmanteau used by tech enthusiasts on social platforms like X (formerly Twitter). It describes a hypothetical or user-modified pairing of Google's Gemini AI with Apple's Siri assistant.
Medical / Cancer Regimen: In oncology, GemIri is a shorthand medical code for a combination chemotherapy regimen consisting of Gemcitabine and Irinotecan
However I thought semen-eye was more clever
The year is 2026 and "Siri mark my medication as taken" returns "I'm sorry I can't do that"
I have used Siri for years and turning on and off lights has never been an issue.
Can we continue it to be somehow room-aware?
You haven’t used the beta
I tried "turn off the lights in [room a] and [room b]" in the new Siri app and rather than Siri saying they can't do compound commands they just turned off the lights in one of the two rooms listed.
So, progress?
Any agent with the Home Assistant MCP hooked up can do it fine.
Now playing "Turn Off the Lights" by Teddy Pendergrass on Apple Music.
That’s been around for ages. Documentation is here: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sirikit
For major platforms: “iOS 10.0+ / iPadOS 10.0+ / macOS 12.0+ / watchOS 3.2+”
Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you’re missing?
$ Siri 'rename this thousand of photos in these folders describing their content and make sure to use the same name for duplicates regardless of their size'
I am waiting for this function to sort my folders
ChatGPT/Claude can do that today.
Yes and even further, Apple added an LLM into iPhone 17s and higher but their terms of use forbid a wide number of categories of queries on it. Which means it can’t be prompted directly by any users.
Most people do not know tools to their problems already existed before AI.
Example: "I can use AI to combine multiple PDFs into a single PDF."
Lmao.
Okay let me just install a tool to do that because the OS doesn't usually have it built in in 2026.
Oh, it's riddled with ads. Oh it's paid for. Etc.
It's the same thing with the recent opening of knowledge thanks to AI.
Before: search for recipe with search riddled with ads, find website riddled with ads cookies notification requests forced sign up and a million other dark patterns, then an entire fucking life story before the recipe.
Now: "find me a good recipe for pasta that uses the stuff I have left over from the party last weekend, I don't mind buying a few more bits".
> Okay let me just install a tool to do that because the OS doesn't usually have it built in in 2026.
On Mac select the PDFs in Finder. Right click on the selected files to bring up the context menu. Select "Create a PDF" from the Quick Actions submenu.
This works with PDF files and image files as inputs.
Okay, now use preview editor to add text...with an outline colour. ;)
Isn't Siri just a bunch of devs in a room editing conditional statements? They'd have to throw out the ecosystem once they embraced a real AI.
Apfel filled that role: $ apfel "List the files in this folder."
https://apfel.franzai.com/
The command might have changed.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=W63oJtX0dP8
The thing is, Apple will have never lost this opportunity. The distribution advantage of the user base is so deep they can basically always implement this at will.
Well, plus a generally technologically illiterate customerbase who believe the time Apple did something was the first time it's ever been done.
What about: just not Siri at all. What about that. What about MrSunshine. I would rather have my own bot that I code. But no, vendor lock in.
I want one named Bobby so I can shout
"Dammit, Bobby! Turn off the dang lights!"
It’d be short sighted to not have a wrapper around which AI to use, even without implementation for them. Like, having an abstract parent class with a Siri implementation of it would be baseline good software engineering.
Yeah; plus we know they're designing with potential future local-only Vs. hybrid Vs. cloud-only in mind depending on hardware/market changes. So having it be this flexible buys them a ton of future potential.
People have speculated that with FPGAs or even an ASIC you could take some smaller models we have today, turn the chip into essentially that model-as-hardware, and get some really compelling performance/power-usage characteristics.
At that point running a GOOD quantized Q8 model on a phone is not beyond the realm.
Maybe we would get LLMs on (pluggable) cartridges.
Yes, it's very Gibson.
That's what I was hoping for with Taalas, ultimately ending up with a microsd-ish card that's hot swappable intelligence.
May happen with Android, not going to happen on $AAPL devices... Heck, even the battery is non-swappable!
This is such a funny comment. I’d been hearing about the un-repairability of Apple products for years and I believed it. Then I went to Shenzhen and walked past an entire floor of individuals doing all sorts of “impossible” repairs right in front of the customer.
My speculation: "impossible" repairs work a lot better when you buy replacements parts for near-market price from a competitively priced seller next door, rather than having to order your parts online from one of a handful of distributors substantially upcharging even for the off-brand version.
Tbf that's where many of the phones stolen by muggers in western countries ultimately end up.
That's "despite", not "because of" Apple.
I’m not even sure how they would implement these features without them being interoperable. All the AI systems use pretty similar if not identical API standards.
That exists already for Apple devices. They just never give third party models first class access to user and device data.
That arrangement will change, somewhat, later today.
And given how Apple switched out OpenAI for Gemini (to power Siri), they experienced firsthand the importance of having said wrapper.
And you can also sideload apps (only in the EU), change you default navigation app from apple maps (only in the EU), and use more features of the NFC reader (only in the EU).
The code for all of those things is there, but not enabled if for most iOS users. There's a non-zero chance this code is there for Apple to try and convince the EU to let them release a Siri AI, and then just like sideloading have some impossible-to-actually-use alternative path to make the DMA happy.
Apple can hold the AI customers hostage by locking this level of AI integration to their app store, taking a 30% cut of AI subscriptions while at the same time having someone else fix the reputation of their devices' voice assistant for them.
There's profit to be made by offering customers choices here, I'm sure Apple will be ready to scoop up all of those delicious slop dollars.
This is a very clever platform play. If you make Siri / your mac the central access point for all AI related workflows and make models interchangeable, then Apple has a huge weapon in the AI race.
I don't disagree, but I do feel the need to point out this was not Apple's plan A. Luckily for them they have so many tools and options at their disposal, that they are able to massively fail at developing their own models and still end up in a good position.
Apple “genius” has been to accept their plan A failed (the original Apple Intelligence), and instead of doubling down, let the others explore the space, then offer a good interface (I say that, I haven’t seen if it’s actually good).
So many other actors in the industry would have just doubled down and follow the race to the bottom
Genius would have been for Apple to get Siri in a better state after so many years.
This looks more like a participation medal, if at all.
I imagine that Google assistant only makes money for Google because they’re an advertising company. Alexa loses money for Amazon and it’s becoming more gated to Prime subscription features as a result. Amazon thought everyone would be buying stuff with their voice and that future never panned out.
It turns out that voice assistants aren’t all that important. Customers aren’t willing to pay for them and they’re more of a nice to have convenience feature.
>This looks more like a participation medal, if at all.
This would be insulting if it even mattered. Apple has fumbled AI while having record breaking quarterly profits. The market does not care.
They didn’t invest in Siri and became the most valuable company in history. I don’t think Siri being better would have mattered much to be honest. Not joining the financial black hole that is AI training seems to have benefited them well so far. But yes, it’s definitely a case of failing upwards.
Adding quotes around “genius” as it seems you misunderstood what I meant
> They didn’t invest in Siri...
What makes you think that? They insisted on Siri for so long and even made a big deal of Apple Intelligence in WWDC.
Then Apple threw the towel and waved the white flag with regards to Siri and replaced their efforts with third party AI.
Because Siri didn’t seem to change over time. If they worked on it over the past decade it’s not to the point where it was visible to users.
What a way to go falling upward with Apple Silicon, five Operating systems, and five ecosystems. In comparison to their competition who are all currently burning billions of dollars.
Their advantage is they are the last vertical computer from the 1980's.
One problem they do have memory will need to come in house.
Meh, AI is deep in it's diversification stage -- there are soooooooo many players in the game right now and basically one maybe two will survive once the dust settles. All these frontier labs are fighting tooth and nail to be the one left standing. Apple is making a measured approach saying "hey, we're probably not going to be the Google of AI, but the smartest thing for us to do is to put infrastructure in place so that once there is a contraction (which there will be, think the search engine landscape in the 2000s) we're relatively ahead for relatively little effort/cost."
So basically do what they have always done for decades?
Apple Intelligence was an outlier in how they historically operate. I mean they literally just put out a folding phone after waiting what, a decade, for others to perfect it first.
Yep. I will never understand why none of their competitors follow that strategy. It’s good we have first movers ready to take some risk Apple has shown over and over again how well their approach to product works. Wait for the market to be discovered and the technology to mature, then enter with a clear vision and high quality product
How can you perfect it when you don't have control of an effective in house operating system or in house chip design. When the dust settles Apple will be number 1 or 1A and number 1 in hardware/software integration.
Are you serious. As a left handed person apparently I'm like a witch or something and can't use Apple's folding phone anyway.
You call that perfect?
And by your logic where do you draw the line. Apple do not have control over TSMC's internal processes. Or Samsung who make the display for them. So your statements reek of culty faff than objective truths.
maybe wait until their plan B succeeds before calling it genius. all we know so far is that plan A has failed.
It’s a very low risk and low effort plan, even if it fails it’s fine. To be contrasted with all the AI players accumulating costs and risks for the AI rollout
I don't know why you're getting downvoted. You're spot on.
Almost everyone developing their own AI is doomed to fail. I would not be surprised that when the dust settles, Microsoft CoPilot and Google Gemini will be left standing while OpenAI and Anthropic fade away. They will get what they need and then throw them away.
"Embrace, extend, extinguish" is the same playbook for decades, and you can only do that when you make money. Yes, making money still matters and post-capitalism is a big fat lie.
I don't think Nadella will survive Copilot if it isn't a roaring success.
Copilot is part of the enterprise suite, so like everything else Microsoft does in that regard it's never been anything but a roaring success by its own definition.
Of course that's relative to how these kinds of things are used, but it really does get used. It might be the best feature of MS Teams.
Copilot is the cockroach of corporate AI. It ain't going nowhere.
It's the same plan. Apple's model is:
Handle the query on device. If the device cannot handle the query, push the query to Private Cloud, If Private Cloud cannot handle the query, push the query to a third party of the users choosing.
Which is pretty much the same as what they announced a few years ago.
Apple underestimated the amount of time and work needed to get to work and really the only bit that I think changed is that Private Cloud (and possibly the on device model) is a white label Google model rather than being developed in-house by Apple.
The problem with that approach is that “how do I handle this query”, and “did I handle that query ok” are both AI-hard problems, and must be tackled near the user, where the large model is not.
It also requires a relatively complex distributed architecture.
I worry about how successful they can be with this approach, in terms of best user experience.
The EU forced this on Apple and other manufacturers. Apple fought this bitterly, but there is only so much market share they are willing to lose before capitulating. https://futurium.ec.europa.eu/es/apply-ai-alliance/community...
I’ve been thinking recently about moving my notes from Notes.app to e.g. Notion because the latter jacks into ChatGPT and Claude, thereby giving them way more power as a personal assistant. This is the exact kind of move that would keep someone like me locked in.
[dead]
My favorite Siri behavior is telling it, on my phone, to turn on a focus state only for it to transfer the request to a nearby HomePod that tells me it can't help with that. I hope the new changes to it are an improvement, but the bar is currently buried in the dirt.
I would pay a good chunk of money if Apple released a local AI hub to coordinate all AI usage locally (including photo indexing).
That is rumored to exist.
https://www.macrumors.com/guide/apple-command-center/
Mark Gurman seems to get extraordinarily accurate and detailed leaks. I wonder how Apple got this leaky. Pretty much everything about the Duo was known months in advance.
Well, either corporate security got incompetent or they intentionally let select leaks exist to "test the market response". Established companies tend to get more risk averse overtime.
Photo indexing is already local. What specifically are you looking for?
You should look at Osaurus.
That’s actually a good solution. Create a platform where app actions can be invoked with a permission model by any AI model.
Maybe apple can even have something similar to MCPs for tool invocations of apps and publish it so all models can actually be trained to use that framework
I actually think this is what they ended up doing - just regular conversations with tool calling into your various apps, behind a Siri AI API. not HTTP based mcps (for now) but rather local ones.
Once Siri gets MCP support, it’ll be my main orchestrator.
I built an app that lets me run terminals on my MacBook. It’s a Next app so I can go to that website on my phone using Tailscale. It has a built-in MCP server, so I can connect it to ChatGPT and have it create terminal sessions, orchestrate terminal sessions, all that good stuff.
Down the line, I’d like to be able to connect it to Siri and just talk to my phone and it can control terminal sessions and projects that I’m working on on my laptop.
Oh, cool. I used tailscale to provide a private web app for my cross-harness orchestrator, too. (https://github.com/BrokkAi/mjolnir/)
I'd love it if Siri does, but I don't expect big corps to keep supporting MCP since MCP gives so much control to the end user, can't charge for eg. Google integration when someone can just add an MCP to handle it.
Yes even ChatGPT locked MCP support behind plus plans for a while.
I pray for the possibility of not only choosing the provider, but being able to choose the thinking level.
I've been using the new siri, and it seems more or less stuck in instant-answer mode, which gives really terrible answers with any provider.
I wish more people were talking about this, but if you can't crank up the models to extended thinking, the technology is more or less stuck at 2004 levels of usefulness.
Apple Foundations Models Framework already aimed towards some generalized API for models. Personally I like it, just as I would be a little happier if instead of codex/claude/antigravity (rip gemini cli) I would have single standardized interface.
With mobile devices especially where ideally models could be shared across several apps.
But this specific code I'd assume is targeted to comply with EU regulations more than anything.
OT:
Since I've moved to Spain my principal Apple account is still in my home country but I've made another one for local app-store (since some local apps aren't available if you're not in the Spanish store).
iPhone is acting really strange, I'm logged to my principal account for iCloud+ and anything and local App Store.
If I log back to my principal account, I loose HCE mode and my building NFC app stops working until I re-log in the Spanish Apple Store.
If I'm logged at the Spanish account, I loose Siri AI which is blocked in the EU...
That would be really cool, if you can route your local model for it.
I think that's the end goal, at least looking at where their hardware is going. Or flexible routing with easy tasks running locally and only the more complex ones hitting the cloud
Don't they need that for China for compliance with their law?
Possibly, but certainly the EU.
Third-party calls won't eat into Apple's compute, so it's not entirely against the interests of Apple as they put caps on people's AI use.
I wonder what the margin on this stuff is for them:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/127901Quite annoying that you need to get the top plan for 5 cameras, and you cannot get more.
I like tinkering with this stuff, everything around me is a perpetual lab, so I have more than 5 cameras that I'd like to hook up to this. But I REALLY don't NEED or WANT 12TB or storage.
I want all of these integrations to be possible locally, without having to send my data to the cloud.
But I cannot. A lot of these nice integrations aren't offered for fully-local setups.
Siri, and Alexa, would be significantly more useful if it could be connected to ChatGPT etc.
It happens now – when I ask certain questions Siri asks if I want ChatGPT to answer it.
That’s gone in 27. You can still ask ChatGPT by prefixing your request with “ask ChatGPT“ like you’ve been able to for the last two years or so.
But it will never prompt you anymore, because Siri AI can handle that stuff now when it couldn’t before.
Whether you think it’s better or not is up to you. I do. I also found the version of ChatGPT it used to be worse than the one in the app.
Good news, Alexa+ (included with Prime) is already an Anthropic model, probably Sonnet.
I don't want to tell Siri to ask Claude or GPT - I want Siri to automatically delegate to another model of my choice when it can't answer something, instead of showing irrelevant web searches.
Anyway, AI operates on top of the device.
Among devices worldwide, who has the most control? Apple
They don’t build AI themselves, but when it comes to device infrastructure that allows AI to operate, Apple is naturally the strongest
Just as Meta had tried to build their own ecosystem through Libra and things like that
Won't AI companies end up doing the same? But that attempt doesn’t seem like it would be easy
Apple now feels like a kind of Coca-Cola stock
Seems Apple's first attempt AI failing two years ago is turning into a blessing. Now they can buy AI as a commodity from the cheapest supplier. Well played.
Hmmm then why is it not available in EU?
This appears to be the current feature prototype intended for the EU and potentially China. Apple has chosen not to release the new Siri AI in the EU because our Digital Markets Act requires them to allow interoperability. I.e. that users be allowed to choose another AI provider.
Ostensibly they'll activate this in the EU when it's ready. Given the current functionality, it looks ready (or close to being ready). My guess is it is ready and Apple is doing their usual negotiation tactics with the EU to see who blinks first.
My secret hope is that Tim Cook was the main weight behind cutting off half the new features from Apple software in the EU an attempt to weaponize their users against legislators. Even features that have had analogues where nobody would've ever asked for interoperability (i.e. Handoff/Continuity exists in the EU, but iPhone mirroring doesn't)
This is not how politics works here.
Apple proposed a solution to the EU after reportedly extensive talks and asked the EU if it would satisfy them.
The EU said “build it then we’ll tell you”, which is crazy.
The problem is not having Siri use different models beneath. That’s not what the EU wants. They want Siri to be replaced by Gemini/etc completely. Which fits with the DMA.
Apple’s proposal was for something akin to an agent that could gather the necessary data for the 3rd party AI to use. Because what they refused to do is let any other AI have unfettered access to everything whenever it wants.
So I suspect this is really for Apple’s benefit. I don’t think the EU would be happy if you could still use Siri, but it was grok underneath. Because that would still be Siri.
> Apple proposed a solution to the EU after reportedly extensive talks and asked the EU if it would satisfy them. The EU said “build it then we’ll tell you”, which is crazy.
This is what Apple claims and I don’t think you should believe it at face value. The EU has an entire team working on negotiating the boundaries with gatekeepers. They have a vested interested in compliance. Apple’s claims don’t sound credible.
The DMA requires interoperability so it requires being able to swap out Siri - completely. Competitors would need to be first class components with full system access. Apple has a long history of anti-competitive action in iOS. For example, Apple doesn’t allow full system cloud backup competition. One must use iCloud or it’s impossible to back up an iPhone over the air.
I side with competition and choice. If people want to use something other than iCloud, or Siri, they should be allowed to do that with their own hardware.
> The DMA requires interoperability so it requires being able to swap out Siri - completely
I fully agree. But Apple is not willing to do that, and I don’t blame them. I actually think they’re right on that one personally, even though it would be a conflict with the law.
I think it is because the EU is requiring broader access to the deeper layers that Apple doesn’t want to give.
EDIT: by broader I mean all apps the user installs on their phone.
Yes. Besides, if you swapped out the thing underneath, you would still get the UI and branding of Siri.
I don’t think that would meet the requirements of the DMA. Would it?
There’s a difference between Apple being able to swap out the model in code and Apple letting end users choose which model to use.
One can imagine a scenario where 1) this requires a Claude or ChatGPT subscription, 2) this subscription needs to be purchased through the iOS app. AI providers get new users, Apple gets its App Store tax, everyone wins.
In my opinion the OS should broker the communication between harnesses (which is part of Siri), LLMs and app functionality. It can take into account the permissions, the user could configure which LLM to use at an OS system settings level and complex workflows can integrate permissions like FaceID only once as the harness then interacts with APIs exposed by applications (arguably already there with app intents).
Self promotion blog article:
https://braw.dev/blog/2026-04-06-mobile-os-as-agentic-broker...
Feels like this is based on the idea that any model is interchangeable with any other, while all of them are better at some stuff, worse at some stuff.
Besides, the modern concept of "agent" is what, some year old? Bit fast to ossify stuff in the OSes already.
It would be great if AI could be completely removed from iOS altogether, including any underlying frameworks.
Agreed. I'm not looking forward to iOS 27 where basically the only option is this new Siri. I was perfectly content with using the old "dumb" Siri to set timers, turn on a light and control my Apple TV and nothing else.
this does not provide much value on Mac, as Claude and ChatGpT apps both have global key activation.
iPhone is different, one button hold on phone without touch the phone is arguably Apple's last and only moat.
Is there any hint that Siri can be connected to arbitrary MCP providers?
Nice, thanks EU for forcing Apple. I guess it was possible all along.
This is not what EU regulators asked for. They want first class access to user data and devices for would-be alternative providers… which Apple simply won’t allow outside PCC.
This is not that. This is expanding the Extensions that you already have. You can look at it in your Settings already.
All of which is why EU users are being left behind on the new Apple Intelligence (for now).
How do you know?
Also given that PCC is just marketing speak for "Apple pinky promise they don't read or share the data", it would be nice to get an API with first class access to my own data. So tired of being locked it.
Claude or ChatGPT for personal assistants? Big NONO.
this is likely true for most applications accessing the standard APIs, a good thing in my book
Neat. Now let me point it to an OpenAI-compatible API endpoint of my choosing, like a Mac Mini running Hermes on my LAN.
I do not want my personal data or the queries against it to leave my network boundaries if at all possible. This should be a default option.
You can download an app that does that. You don’t have to use Siri, and it can be turned off entirely, or decoupled from AI entirely, and the wake word can be disabled entirely. A lot of options are available.
Make a Shortcut that will open your local voice assistant app of choice when you press the action button.
News at 11: Developers write decoupled code.
If this consistently has happened at every place you've worked in your career, I think you're luckier than you realize. Independent of the implementation, it's also still interesting as a sign of what might be supported for users down the line; I don't agree that this is how they'd write the code if they never expected to allow another provider, and other comments in the thread have already provided some insight into what the context might be (e.g. EU market).
Apple had enough experience relying on and being screwed by third parties that they have a built-in allergy to it. They do not like being boxed in and always want to be in control of their destiny.
This would’ve been useful during their bake off where they were trying to choose if they wanted to go with Google, Anthropic, or OpenAI. But even without that, they would absolutely not want to be in a situation where they had to redo everything to get off a bad partner.
They are currently getting rid of Qualcomm modems the new fold iPhone is using an Apple in house modem (C2) and due to market conditions Apple will probably have to do something with memory because of the three head cartel and the Chinese.
Apple has a long and contentious relationship with Qualcomm, and Qualcomm is big enough and important enough Apple couldn’t bully them into doing what they want.
I think it makes a lot of sense for Apple to control their own destiny there. It’s let them focus on the things they care about like power efficiency and tighter integration.
DRAM is a complete commodity. I don’t think making their own makes any sense. They don’t make their own screws. Although the reaction from iFixit would be hilarious. If Apple makes their own DRAM I don’t see how it would be any different from what SK Hynix sells.
The useful thing would be fabbing it since that’s the bottleneck. But that commits them to the insanity of running their own fabs and keeping them up-to-date and on the bleeding edge forever.
And even if they want to do that, they’d have to buy all the experienced people, the ASML machines that I assume are spoken for for the next few years, etc.
What does a full integration of claude or openAI models into the phone even mean? What additional functionality can one get and what are those use cases? Does it actually pull in more users to the voice/Siri interface? I mean even with vastly superior models, does it move the needle enough to attract more users?
"Designed" is a stretch here, lmao.
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They could definitely take that risk.
They could instead make a good assumption that you'll search the web, open the Yelp or OpenTable app. Take your phone to your favorite restaurant and/or pay with a credit card at the grocery store.
If you walk to a taco truck without your phone and pay with cash, you probably don’t do that every time and you generate enough data through other means to be accurately advertised to.
There’s a reason everyone knows the various wake words.
All the big companies know how suicidal that would be. They already get accused of it by people who don’t understand how targeted web advertising works.
Some of the new AI start-ups don’t seem to understand that, but Apple absolutely will not make a mistake that stupid.
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No what I was trying to say is it’s not listening for anything it can sell ads against, it’s set to trigger on a specific word. The rest of the phone has no idea you’re talking until the processor recognizes the water word (possibly by mistake) and then (I assume) raises an interrupt.
I’m not claiming benevolence. Apple is less benevolent now than ever, however much you think that was.
They care about money. And I think they care about selling $1000 phones + tie ins far more than small amounts from advertising on all their phones by surveilling what people are talking about and risking those sales.
Trust me. They’re already shoving ads everywhere without that, much to my annoyance.
Apple is highly sensitive to dangers to its reputation. They would nuke any service that seemed to be spying on users, just like they revoked Facebook's cert back in 2019 over the same issue.
Glad I’ve never turned on Siri
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Just playing the devil advocate: what happens when the answers from a not-Apple LLM are garbage? Who the users are going to blame, Apple or OpenAI, Anthropic, etc..? I'm not 100% on Apple side on this, I would love to chose whatever I want, even local models, but I get why trey trying to control 100% of the user experience. If they could trust any provider with customers data, they would let them in, since they're not competitors. They would even let Apple not spend a ton of money on developing LLMs....
Are people blaming Apple when Google search in Safari gives garbage results? Some probably are, but that really shouldn’t be a relevant discussion, in particular when the user explicitly chose which AI backend to use.
I don't think your example fit this scenario: when you search things in google, you know you are using google. When you ask Siri to do something and the answer is garbage, where the issue lies? It's Siri not giving the right context? It's Siri that is not providing the correct tools to the LLM? Or it's the LLM that botched it? We already see these kind of issue with LLM and harness, and we are talking with developers that "should" know how to move in this scenario ;)
Well, we can generalize this a bit to model routing in general. Actually, just AI in general - even when directly interacting with GPT we haven't figured out good protocols yet.
If you are smart enough to change the default, you would know which LLM you picked and could point the finger at it.
Apple is in the game of providing an application platform. Maybe in the future they will provide their own LLM.
See my comment above: unfortunately Siri and the LLM provider are interwiven, there is not clear cut border between the two, even for experienced users
In house memory is more important...
Why, the users will blame anyone but Apple, of course.
I can promise you Apple is constantly being blamed by its customers for things out of its control. I worked at an Apple store for years. All sorts of carrier issues, third party accessories, and app problems were chalked up to Apple screwing up.