Hey Siri, It’s Not Me – It’s You: How Apple’s Assistant Became the Village Idiot in an AI World

Introduction: “Hey Siri… Are You Even Listening?”

I’ve been an iPhone user for over a decade, and Siri has been by my side (or rather, in my pocket) since day one. We’ve had some good times – that first moment in 2011 when I asked Siri to tell me a joke and she actually delivered, I was floored. Siri felt like magic back then, the start of a sci-fi future. But here I am in late 2025, feeling like I’m talking to a broken record while the rest of the world chats with genius AI assistants. Every morning now, I catch myself doing something almost sacrilegious for an Apple loyalist: I ignore Siri and tap the ChatGPT app instead. Why? Because Siri, frankly, has become the dullard at the smart assistant dinner party, hopelessly outclassed by the new AI superstars. As one frustrated Redditor put it, “Can’t believe Siri remains shit all those years”reddit.com. In an era when OpenAI’s ChatGPT can tell captivating stories, analyze images, and hold a conversation with real nuance, Siri still struggles to set a simple timer without a miscommunication. It’s like witnessing a once-promising student now hopelessly behind in class – painful and perplexing in equal measure.

It’s not just my personal gripe. The AI landscape of 2024–2025 has left Siri in the dust, and countless iPhone users are voicing the same exasperation. Browse any Apple forum or the Siri subreddit and you’ll see post after post with titles like “Siri is a complete disappointment” and “Siri isn’t Siri anymore”techradar.com. What was once a cutting-edge feature has become a punchline. And while Siri has languished, a new generation of AI assistants has risen – smarter, faster, far more capable. This article is my first-person account, as a devoted but increasingly frustrated iPhone user, of how and why Siri fell so far behind. It’s a journey through broken promises, technical roadblocks, and the stark reality that if Apple doesn’t fix its beloved assistant soon, it risks losing even its most faithful fans. Consider this both a critique and a warning from someone who truly wants Siri to succeed: Apple, pull your head out of the sand, or the “smart” in smartphone will belong to someone else. After all, if my next phone came with an AI as smart as ChatGPT or Claude built-in, would I even miss Siri?

Once the Future, Now a Fossil

I still remember the sense of wonder in 2011 when I pressed the home button of my shiny new iPhone 4S and heard Siri’s friendly voice for the first time. “What can I help you with?” she asked, and it felt like the future had arrived. Back then, Siri was a revolution – the first major voice assistant that millions of everyday people actually used. She could set reminders, send texts by voice, answer trivia questions (sort of), and tell corny jokes. Apple marketed Siri as a way to “do it all even when your hands are full,” and it was genuinely impressive at the timetheatlantic.com. For a while, Siri had the field mostly to herself, and Apple steadily added basic skills: from checking the weather to turning on the lights with HomeKit. There was a comforting predictability to Siri’s abilities – limited, yes, but reliable for those narrow tasks.

However, the cracks started showing long before the current AI boom. As early as the mid-2010s, competitors began overtaking Siri. Amazon’s Alexa was soon in millions of homes, and Google Assistant learned to have more natural conversations and tap into Google’s vast search knowledge. Siri, meanwhile, got a reputation for being finicky and, well, not that bright. Apple, famous for its secrecy and slow-burn development, seemed oddly complacent with Siri. By 2018 or so, techies were openly poking fun at how often Siri’s response to a question was just “Here’s what I found on the web” – essentially punting you to a Google search rather than giving a straight answertheatlantic.com. It became an open secret that Siri’s underlying technology was stuck in the past, built on an old-school approach to language processing that couldn’t easily be upgraded. Indeed, Apple’s voice assistant wowed the world at launch but was “swiftly overtaken by its rivals – even before AI chatbots like ChatGPT came along,” as one retrospective notedtechradar.com. Over time Siri improved in small ways, but the improvements always felt incremental, while the competition leapt ahead.

By the time 2022 rolled around, many of us long-time iPhone users had essentially given up on Siri for anything remotely challenging. I used Siri to set timers while cooking or ask for the weather, but if I needed to look up information or get directions, I’d often cut her off mid-answer: “...searching the web for—” “Stop, Siri.” I’d sigh and just use my browser or another app. It was almost muscle memory – Siri was the thing you used for trivial requests and nothing more. Little did we know, this was the calm before the storm. Because in late 2022, a little research project called ChatGPT escaped from the labs and landed on our screens – and Siri’s fate, along with the whole notion of “voice assistant,” would never be the same.

The LLM Revolution That Left Siri Behind

When OpenAI’s ChatGPT burst onto the scene, it was like an earthquake in the tech world. Here was an AI you could chat with about almost anything: it could solve coding problems, compose emails, brainstorm ideas, and actually carry on a conversation. By 2024, OpenAI had iterated this technology into GPT-4 and made it accessible to regular users (through a handy smartphone app, no less). Suddenly, the limitations of Siri felt glaring. Siri was a voice assistant; ChatGPT and its kin were something much more – they were broad intelligence engines, or large language models (LLMs), that could reason, create, and contextualize information at a level we’d never seen in consumer tech. As The Atlantic quipped in a 2024 headline, “OpenAI just killed Siri”theatlantic.com. It might sound hyperbolic, but watching the strides these new AI models made, it truly felt like Siri and her peers had been rendered obsolete overnight.

Consider this: earlier in 2024, OpenAI demonstrated an updated ChatGPT running on an iPhone that could understand spoken prompts, see through the phone’s camera, and respond with eerily human-like expressivenesstheatlantic.com. In one demo, this AI assistant told a bedtime story with dramatic flair, then interpreted a photo taken with the iPhone’s camera, then seamlessly translated a conversation between English and Italian – all within one apptheatlantic.com. My jaw dropped watching this. Here was an app on the same device as Siri, effectively doing ten things Siri could never dream of doing, all at once. As the demo unfolded, the Atlantic writer watching confessed: “I felt I was witnessing the murder of Siri… at the hands of a company most people had not heard of just two years ago.”theatlantic.com Strong words, but entirely apt. Siri, by contrast, can’t “see” through my camera, can’t read a handwritten note, and often struggles to understand what I’m saying if I stray from a very narrow command structure. Apple’s own marketing still presented Siri as this friendly but simple voice that could set your alarm or play a song while your hands are fulltheatlantic.com – useful, sure, but almost quaint when compared to the generative AI superpowers emerging.

And it wasn’t just OpenAI. By 2024–2025, a whole lineup of next-gen AI assistants arrived on the scene, each highlighting Siri’s shortcomings:

• ChatGPT (OpenAI) – The poster child of the AI boom. By 2024, it wasn’t just a text box in a web browser; it had a dedicated iPhone app with voice input and a realistic voice output. ChatGPT could carry on context-rich conversations for hours, recall what you said earlier, and answer far more complex questions than Siri ever could. Siri, at best, might answer a factual query by reading out a Wikipedia snippet or more often just direct you to Safari. ChatGPT would give you a nuanced answer, ask if you wanted more detail, and even remember that you have an upcoming trip to Rome (because you mentioned it 10 messages ago) and proactively offer travel tips. One journalist noted that calling Siri or the old Google Assistant “assistants” now feels “insulting” by comparison, because these AI chatbots condense so many abilities into a single packagetheatlantic.com. Indeed, “to call Siri… an ‘assistant’ is insulting,” they wrote, after witnessing ChatGPT’s capabilitiestheatlantic.com. Ouch – but true.

• Claude (Anthropic) – If ChatGPT was like an Ivy League prodigy, Anthropic’s Claude was the savant with an eidetic memory. Claude 2 debuted with the ability to ingest and analyze 100,000 tokens of text (basically an entire novel’s worth of words) in one go. People were using it to summarize lengthy reports or have it read through whole PDFs – tasks utterly beyond Siri’s realm. Claude was also known for being conversational and helpful, and interestingly, Apple’s own team took notice. In mid-2025, a Bloomberg report revealed Apple was testing Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s tech as possible brains for a new Siricultofmac.com. Think about that: Apple, famously obsessed with controlling its ecosystem, was so desperate to smarten up Siri that it considered essentially outsourcing Siri’s “brain” to a competitor’s AIcultofmac.com. As that report noted, Apple’s execs found Claude’s technology “most promising for Siri’s needs” after rounds of testingcultofmac.com. To me, that speaks volumes – even Apple implicitly admitted its in-house Siri tech wasn’t up to snuff. (We’ll delve more into this “Anthropic or OpenAI inside Siri” plan later – and why it’s controversial for Apple’s privacy stance.)

• Gemini (Google) – Not to be outdone, Google scrambled to integrate its own cutting-edge AI (codenamed Gemini) into products. By late 2024, Google announced “Assistant with Bard,” essentially fusing their voice assistant with the generative AI power of Google’s Bard/Gemini model. Android phones like the Pixel 8 suddenly boasted AI features that could, for instance, summarize your emails or draft a social media post based on a photo, all via voice commandblog.google. Samsung even beat Apple to the punch by partnering with Google: Samsung’s latest devices integrated Google’s generative AI (Gemini) at a deep leveltheatlantic.com. In fact, Samsung’s newest Galaxy phones and Google’s own Pixel were specifically tuned to run AI models like Geminitheatlantic.com. This meant on those devices, you could have near-instant, AI-enhanced interactions without waiting for a cloud response. Meanwhile on my iPhone, Siri still pauses awkwardly and says, “Working on it…” half the time, only to return a web link. The contrast is stark.

• Microsoft’s Copilots – While not a “voice assistant” on the phone per se, Microsoft embraced AI assistants across the board. In Windows 11, the Windows Copilot sits right on the taskbar – an AI helper that can not only fetch info but actually control settings and apps on your PC. Microsoft 365 Copilot can draft your emails in Outlook, crunch data in Excel, or summarize meetings in Teams. It’s as if every part of the Microsoft ecosystem got an AI upgrade in 2023–2024. Now imagine that level of AI integration on an iPhone: a Siri that could draft a Pages document for you, rewrite your text messages more politely, or analyze your Screen Time data to suggest healthier habits. Apple simply doesn’t have that (yet). iOS has little smarts in those areas beyond rudimentary suggestions. So even though Copilot isn’t an iPhone feature, it sets a user expectation that our devices and apps should help us intelligently, not just passively do what we manually tell them. In that sense, Apple’s reluctance to infuse AI deeply into iOS and macOS (beyond some autocorrect improvements or trivial features) is making the iPhone feel like a laggard’s device. When I sit at my Windows PC, I can ask Copilot to summarize a PDF. On my iPhone, I can’t ask Siri to summarize even a single web article – she’ll just offer to “send that to your Reading List” or something not particularly useful.

• Elon Musk’s Grok (xAI) – The parade of new AIs even includes a wildcard from Mr. Musk. Grok, launched in late 2023, is an AI chatbot that connects to real-time information on X (formerly Twitter) and is designed to have a bit of an attitude (Musk promised it would answer questions with a style he described as “with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak”). While Grok is still finding its footing, the mere fact that Musk started an AI company (xAI) and built a chatbot integrated with his social network and even Tesla cars shows how hot this field is. Grok is already available as an app on iOS and touts itself as a “trusted assistant for deep work” that can create documents, write code, and leverage real-time searchx.ai. I gave it a whirl out of curiosity – it’s rough around the edges, but it did pull in live info from X and answered more knowledgeably than Siri typically does. The specifics of Grok aside, it underscores that everybody is trying to build a smarter assistant now. When even the notoriously hardware-averse Twitter guy is making AI apps that run on my iPhone, and they’re more fun to talk to than Siri… well, that says something.

• Perplexity and Other AI Apps – Beyond the big names, there’s a swarm of third-party AI assistant apps on the App Store. One standout is Perplexity, which essentially acts like a supercharged Siri/Google hybrid. You ask Perplexity a question (by voice or text), and it gives you a direct answer with cited sources, often in seconds. It’s like if Siri actually gave you a concise answer and showed the references – imagine that! I’ve found myself using Perplexity when I need a quick fact or to settle a debate, because I know I’ll get a straight answer rather than Siri’s web search dance. And then there’s the likes of DeepSeek, a Chinese startup’s AI app that made global headlines in early 2025 by overtaking ChatGPT to become the top-rated free app on the U.S. App Storereuters.com. DeepSeek basically offers GPT-4-level intelligence for free (the company has its own LLMs) and even being a newcomer from overseas, it attracted a huge user base. When I see “DeepSeek’s AI Assistant… has overtaken rival ChatGPT to become the top-rated free app on Apple’s App Store” in Reutersreuters.com, my immediate thought is: wow, people are really hungry for smarter assistants on their phones. They’re literally downloading alternative AI apps by the millions. And every one of those downloads is essentially a vote of no confidence in Siri and her ilk. Siri is baked into every iPhone, yet iPhone users are flocking to these third-party AI apps to get capabilities they can’t get from Siri. That’s astonishing.

In short, we’ve entered a new era. These modern AI assistants (powered by LLMs and other generative models) are to Siri what smartphones were to flip phones. They condense many tools into one, they understand context, they perform complex tasks, and they learn. Siri, on the other hand, feels stuck in 2015 at best. She’s narrowly functional and not truly “intelligent.” One Atlantic writer observed that generative AI is poised to “condense all of a smartphone’s functions into a single app, and add a whole host of new ones”, and if that comes to pass, “to call Siri or Google Assistant ‘assistants’ is, by comparison, insulting.”theatlantic.com Reading that line struck a chord with me – because I realize I already treat my iPhone that way. My ChatGPT app (or insert AI of choice) is the brain of my device now; Siri is the just the voice that sets a 5-minute timer for my pasta and then politely gets out of the way.

Frustration in the Trenches: Siri vs. Everyday Reality

Let me paint a picture of daily life with Siri in 2025, as an avid AI user. It’s 7 AM and I’m juggling a toothbrush in one hand and trying to check my calendar on my phone with the other. “Hey Siri, what’s on my schedule today?” I mumble through toothpaste. Siri chirps pleasantly and… offers to show me my calendar app. Not read out the important events, not summarize my day, just a shortcut to the app. Useful? Barely. So I rinse, spit, and ask again: “Siri, any important meetings today?” This time she tries to parse “important” by searching the web for “important meetings” – facepalm. I sigh, pick up my phone and open the calendar manually. In contrast, I could open the ChatGPT app and say, “Check my calendar and email and tell me if there’s anything urgent today.” Now, ChatGPT doesn’t natively have my calendar access (yet), but third-party AI apps like Microsoft’s new Outlook Copilot or others can do that. Siri is theoretically integrated with all my Apple apps, but her intelligence is so limited that integration often doesn’t translate to usefulness.

A common frustration is Siri’s lack of context retention. If I ask, “How’s the weather in Lisbon this weekend?” she’ll dutifully read the forecast. But if I follow up with “What about next weekend?” – nine times out of ten, Siri doesn’t get that “what about” refers to the weather query. She either says she can’t help with that or does something completely off-base. In contrast, any modern chatbot (Bard, ChatGPT, etc.) would effortlessly carry the context. Siri lives in a perpetual 15-second memory loop, while the new AIs have long-term memory (at least within a conversation). This means with Siri I can’t build on a conversation naturally. It’s always one-shot, simple commands. That’s a huge limitation for usability. As one Reddit user lamented, Siri still can’t handle back-to-back questions or follow-ups without freezing up – it’s like she’s “stuck in 2009,” whereas a more advanced language model could actually keep a conversation flowingnews.macgasm.netnews.macgasm.net. Apple knows this, and even promised that a future Siri would handle follow-up queries gracefully thanks to a new LLM-based enginenews.macgasm.net – but we’re still waiting (more on those broken promises soon).

Then there’s Siri’s perennial hearing problem. It’s become a dark running joke that Siri is the family member with bad hearing: you have to enunciate extremely clearly and in a quiet room to get what you want. Ask her to “Play Hey Jude by the Beatles” and if you’re unlucky, she might respond, “I found some web results for beetles.” Meanwhile, I’ve tested ChatGPT’s new voice mode and other AI voice assistants like Perplexity Voice – they feel far more robust at understanding natural speech, even with some background noise or an accent. Apple did improve Siri’s speech recognition over the years (credit where it’s due: she’s a lot better than the early days when “Call Alex” could become “Text Alice”), but the intelligence behind it is lacking. Understanding the words is one thing; understanding the intent is another. Siri still often fails at intent. For example, I once told Siri, “Remind me when I get to the office to send the budget report,” and she set a reminder for “when I get to the office” but the content was literally “send the budget report.” She didn’t understand that “budget report” was a file on my iCloud drive or an email draft or anything contextually rich – it was just dumb text to her. A well-integrated AI could have perhaps found the document or asked “Which budget report? The Excel sheet you edited yesterday?” Siri’s ceiling is just so low.

No wonder so many of us have basically re-scoped what we use Siri for to the bare minimum. As one person online quipped, “The only use I have for Siri is getting it to set an alarm… nothing else.”reddit.com Another chimed in, “After I enabled [the new AI features], Siri is still the same old mediocre Siri.”reddit.com And these comments were 10 months ago – in other words, even after some of Apple’s early attempts to integrate ChatGPT, people saw no tangible improvement. In my experience, integrating ChatGPT via Siri (the “Siri + OpenAI” shortcut that Apple added in iOS 17/18) is clunky and half-baked. You have to say “ask ChatGPT” as a prefix or Siri just does her usual thing. And when Siri does relay the question to ChatGPT, the answers come back truncated and often contextless, as many users observed. In fact, one detailed Reddit post declared “Siri/ChatGPT integration is an embarrassment — clunky, contextless...” and that the answers via Siri were shorter and worse than just using ChatGPT directlyreddit.com. I concur – it feels like Apple slapped a Ferrari engine onto a horse cart without upgrading the wheels. The bottleneck is still Siri’s system.

To be fair, Siri isn’t alone in the legacy voice assistant woes. Amazon’s Alexa, once considered the leader in voice interactions, has also faced stagnation – arguably even more so, since Amazon heavily subsidized Alexa for years without a clear profit model, and it showed in slow innovation. Alexa became famous for two things: playing music and telling corny jokes, and not much else. Amazon’s own insiders have been brutally honest: “We had all the resources… to become the unequivocal market leader in conversational AI,” a former Alexa engineer wrote, “but most of that tech never saw the light of day… Alexa AI was riddled with technical and bureaucratic problems.”businessinsider.combusinessinsider.com Essentially, Amazon dropped the ball with Alexa, failing to evolve it into the kind of AI brain that ChatGPT or others have become. That sounds eerily similar to Siri’s story, doesn’t it? Both Siri and Alexa are examples of the first generation of voice assistants that hit a ceiling. They were built on older paradigms (keyword detection, limited dialogue trees, cloud APIs for specific domains) and both companies struggled to retrofit them with true AI capabilities. In Amazon’s case, a leaked memo in 2024 showed their attempt to upgrade Alexa with generative AI (dubbed “Alexa AI”) was running into latency issues so severe that testers gave it poor ratings, delaying the launch repeatedlytechradar.com. At one point, Amazon missed three planned launch dates for its new Alexa because the AI was too slow and occasionally too inaccurate (hallucinating or failing at basic tasks)techradar.comtechradar.com. One particularly damning anecdote: the new Alexa was great at “showing off” complex answers, but sometimes “couldn’t reliably turn on the lights”theverge.com – the very thing people expect Alexa to do flawlessly. It’s almost dark comedy: in trying to make Alexa more like Jarvis, Amazon temporarily made it worse at being Clapper.

I mention Alexa here because it highlights a broader point: the entire paradigm of pre-LLM voice assistants has hit a dead end. Siri and Alexa are both stuck in that cul-de-sac. They were revolutionary in 2011, passable in 2015, embarrassing by 2023. Google Assistant fared a bit better by leveraging Google’s search smarts, but even Google saw the writing on the wall and is now pivoting to full generative AI integration (Assistant with Bard). As a user, I don’t particularly care which company’s assistant is smarter; I just want some assistant that is smart. Apple’s competitive advantage used to be that Siri was right there on my phone, a tap or “Hey Siri” away, whereas any third-party AI meant unlocking the device and opening an app. But even that convenience edge is eroding. For instance, Apple now lets you trigger shortcuts or apps with voice in certain ways, and I find myself using a Shortcut to invoke ChatGPT with a custom phrase. It’s hacky, but doable. And rumors are swirling that Apple might eventually allow changing the default assistant (imagine replacing Siri with, say, Alexa or Google Assistant – unthinkable a few years ago, but not off the table if Siri fully faceplants). At the end of the day, if Siri continues to frustrate, users will find workarounds. We always do. And that’s a scary prospect for Apple, whose ecosystem lock-in partly relies on people using and trusting the built-in apps and services. Siri’s failure doesn’t just hurt Siri; it hurts the whole perception of Apple as an “it just works” platform.

One more personal anecdote: I used to chuckle at those overly harsh “Siri sucks” comments online – I’d think, come on, she’s not that bad, you’re just asking for too much. But my perspective flipped the moment I got deeply into using AI tools in my daily routine. Now I rely on ChatGPT or Claude to help draft emails, troubleshoot code, summarize articles, brainstorm meal plans – tasks Siri could never even attempt. The more I taste what’s possible, the more unbearable Siri’s limitations become. It has reached the point that I feel actively hindered by Siri. It’s like having a super-smart intern at work (ChatGPT) and also a long-time secretary (Siri) who means well but doesn’t understand half your requests; you start bypassing the secretary entirely. And then you wonder, do I even need that role filled by them if someone else (or something else) could do it better? That’s the crossroads where many iPhone users find themselves today. And it’s why we’re looking at Apple and saying: you’ve got to step up your game.

Apple Wakes Up (Late) to the AI Race

Faced with this tidal wave of new AI tech, Apple has finally started to stir. For most of 2023, as ChatGPT mania took over and every Big Tech company started touting AI features, Apple was conspicuously quiet. The company’s WWDC 2023 keynote barely mentioned generative AI. Tim Cook would give the occasional bland quote like “AI is integral to our products” – pointing to things like photo search or keyboard autocorrect – but Apple offered nothing akin to a ChatGPT or Bard competitor that year. It gave the impression (to the public at least) that Apple was either caught off-guard or just deliberately choosing a slow, careful approach (perhaps due to their emphasis on privacy and on-device processing). This led to a lot of criticism in the tech press. Folks at Apple surely heard it: the murmurs that “Apple is lagging behind Google, Microsoft, OpenAI in the AI race”news.macgasm.net. Even analysts and fans started calling out Apple’s absence in the conversation. As one article in May 2025 put it, “Siri may have been one of the first voice assistants, but it never really kept up with smarter tools like ChatGPT or Bard. Unlike its competitors, Apple avoided flashy AI rollouts, which only fueled the perception that it had fallen behind.”news.macgasm.net That captures it perfectly – Apple’s low-key approach just made the gap seem even bigger.

Internally, though, Apple was indeed scrambling. Behind the scenes, the company formed a unit called “Apple GPT” (as leaked to the press) to develop its own large language model, reportedly codenamed Ajax. By mid-2023, rumors swirled that Apple employees were testing an in-house chatbot akin to ChatGPT, but it was strictly internal. They were treading carefully, probably trying to figure out how to integrate such technology without mucking up their precious privacy image or letting an AI hallucinate misinformation to consumers. Apple’s public response finally came at WWDC 2024, and they branded it in the most Apple-y way possible: “Apple Intelligence.” I was virtually glued to the livestream that day, knowing AI had to be addressed. Sure enough, Apple devoted a good chunk of the keynote to outlining how they would transform Siri (and iOS broadly) with new AI features under the Apple Intelligence bannernews.macgasm.net. It was a bit unusual – Apple usually doesn’t pre-announce features a year or more in advance, but here they were basically saying: “Hey, we know Siri has fallen behind, and we’re working on it – trust us, great stuff is coming.”

Let’s unpack what Apple promised with Apple Intelligence and the Siri revamp at WWDC 2024, because it sounded like everything I ever wanted from Siri (and then some). According to Apple, the new Siri (sometimes dubbed “Siri 2.0” by commentators) would have five pillars of improvementnews.macgasm.netnews.macgasm.net:

1. Personal Contextual Awareness: Siri would finally tap into the data you personally have on your device to answer questions about your life. This means Siri could, for example, pull up “that recipe your friend sent you last week” if you ask, or tell you “your passport number” when you’re filling out a formnews.macgasm.net. Instead of being a generic Q&A bot, Siri would “actually know you,” in Apple’s wordsnews.macgasm.net. This is huge – it acknowledges one of Siri’s key weaknesses: she’s blind to context and personal info. An AI that securely leverages my messages, emails, files (with permission) to give me relevant answers? That would truly be an assistant for me, not just a general oracle.

2. On-Device Screen Understanding: Siri was going to get the ability to understand what’s currently on my iPhone screen and take actions related to it. Apple gave an example: if you have an address showing in a text message on screen, you could simply tell Siri “Add this to their contact” and Siri would know what “this” refers tonews.macgasm.net. Or say you’re looking at a photo, you might ask “Edit this photo to improve lighting” and Siri would act (combining Siri with the Photos app’s tools). No more awkwardly describing what “this” is – Siri would have screen smarts to eliminate all that tedious manual context-givingnews.macgasm.net. This was basically catching up to what Google’s Assistant/Bard was already previewing (Google calls it “Android’s AI overlay” where you can have an AI read whatever’s on screen and help). Still, for iPhone users, this was very welcome news.

3. Multi-Step Automation via Voice (Shortcuts integration): Siri has had Shortcuts for a while, but you usually have to set them up manually and invoke them in clunky ways. Apple promised that Siri would get deeply integrated with app Shortcuts such that one natural-language command could trigger complex multi-app sequencesnews.macgasm.net. For example, “Hey Siri, send the draft email I wrote yesterday to Alice and Mark” could automatically find that email in your drafts, attach that photo named “project.jpg” you mentioned in it, and send – all in one gonews.macgasm.net. Or “Hey Siri, edit this photo and save it to my Notes for John” would apply some photo edits and drop it in a shared notenews.macgasm.net. Essentially, Siri was to become a genuine task completer, not just a task initiator. This is exactly the kind of thing we see AI agents starting to do (like Microsoft’s experimental “AutoActions” with Copilot). If Siri could really pull that off, it’d be a game-changer for productivity on iOS.

4. Conversational Continuity: At long last, Siri was set to gain the ability to handle back-to-back queries and follow-ups without losing contextnews.macgasm.net. This was described as Siri no longer acting like it’s “stuck in 2009” (a direct nod to the frustration we talked about)news.macgasm.net. With a more advanced language model under the hood, Siri should be able to “keep the conversation flowing, even if you stumble mid-sentence”news.macgasm.net. Imagine being able to ask, “Siri, schedule a meeting with Bob next week,” then saying “Actually, make it the week after and include Charlie,” and Siri understanding that the subject (meeting) and context (dates, participants) persisted. That’s the dream, right? Apple clearly was promising that dream – effectively bringing Siri to parity with how one can converse with ChatGPT or others.

5. ChatGPT as Backup Brain: Perhaps the most surprising pillar – Apple acknowledged that Siri alone might not handle every query, so they built in an option for Siri to seamlessly tap ChatGPT (OpenAI) for helpnews.macgasm.net. If Siri couldn’t answer something on-device, with your permission it would send the request to ChatGPT and fetch an answer, all while supposedly protecting your privacy (Apple said your IP and identity would be hidden in the process)news.macgasm.netnews.macgasm.net. This was framed as Apple not “trying to do everything alone” – they’d wisely lean on the best in the business (OpenAI) where needednews.macgasm.net. In effect, Siri would become a sort of meta-assistant: attempting to answer locally first, but having a direct line to a cloud super-brain when stumpednews.macgasm.net. It’s a bit humbling from Apple’s perspective, but as a user I thought, “Finally, thank goodness!” Because we’d already been manually doing this – asking Siri and getting web results, then running to ChatGPT to actually get an answer. Apple essentially said they’d cut out the middleman and let Siri use ChatGPT for you, saving some hassle (again, with user permission each time, which is understandable for privacy).

Additionally, Apple gave Siri a visual makeover: in iOS 18 they previewed a new Siri UI with a glowing orb animation around the entire screen, and crucially they added a text input for Sirinews.macgasm.net. The latter basically turns Siri into a chatbot when you prefer typing – something iPhone users like me had wanted for ages (sometimes you can’t or don’t want to talk out loud, but still want Siri’s help). Combined with the above smarts, it really did sound like Siri was about to leapfrog into an AI-powered future, addressing nearly every gripe on our list. On paper, Siri 2.0 looked ready to take on ChatGPT or Google Assistantnews.macgasm.net, as one commentator noted. And honestly, at WWDC 2024, I was encouraged. Apple seemed to finally get it – they were acknowledging Siri’s shortcomings publicly and showing a plan to fix it in a big way. They even had a slick demo video, if you recall, where an actress (Bella Ramsey) showed off these new Siri abilities like referencing on-screen info and personal context. It made headlines; for the first time in a while people said “maybe Siri will be cool again.”

But then… nothing. Or next to nothing.

The Big Delay: Siri, Interrupted

Apple’s grand Siri reboot was supposed to start rolling out with iOS 18 in late 2024. When that software hit my iPhone (alongside the iPhone 16 models), I eagerly tried all the new Siri tricks – only to find none of the headlining features were actually there. No on-screen context awareness, no personal knowledge, no conversational memory. I could type to Siri (nice, but minor), and there was some new Siri visual cue, but functionally it was the same old Siri. A lot of users were baffled. Did Apple delay the features? Were they hidden behind some settings? Over the next few months, Apple dribbled out a couple of small additions – for instance, an update in early 2025 finally let Siri handle back-to-back timers (a long-demanded capability, but hardly the generative AI leap we expected). Overall, Siri still felt stuck in its old groovenews.macgasm.net. The tech press and savvy users noticed, of course. By early 2025, whispers turned into open disappointment: Where is the smarter Siri Apple promised? On Reddit, one might see sarcastic posts like “Apple lied to us about Apple Intelligence – where is it?” Indeed, a Reddit thread titled “Apple lied to us about Apple Intelligence and ‘New, upgraded Siri’” captured that sentiment, saying Apple’s confidence from WWDC 2024 was misplaced and nothing had been delivered (the OP noting, “Apple Intelligence has not delivered on its promise.”)reddit.com. It was deja vu – Siri had once again missed a key growth moment.

It turned out Apple was quietly backpedaling. As 2025 rolled on, they removed or hid some of the promotional materials. That Bella Ramsey Siri ad? It was apparently scrubbed from Apple’s YouTube channel (though eagle-eyed fans noticed it still lived on the actress’s Instagram, a funny slip-up)news.macgasm.net. This kind of revisionism signaled something was wrong. Finally, in March 2025, Apple came clean – or as close to that as you’d expect from a PR-polished firm. A spokesperson told veteran Apple reporter John Gruber that “It’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features”, and that they hoped to ship the new Siri capabilities “within the coming year.”news.macgasm.net In other words, sorry folks, we’re delaying this to 2025/2026. Coming from Apple, that was a pretty stark admission of a slip. They didn’t pin an exact date, but the messaging suggested maybe late 2025. Optimistically, some of us assumed this meant iOS 19 in fall 2025 would bring the goodies. Spoiler: it didn’t. At WWDC 2025, Apple updated the timeline again: they’re now targeting a “spring 2026” launch for the AI-powered Siritechradar.com. Yep, a full two years after the initial announcement. My heart sank hearing that. 2026? In the AI world, that feels like an eternity. By 2026, who knows what ChatGPT version we’ll be on or what new players might emerge (maybe everyone will be using some OpenAI GPT-5 or DeepMind Gemini v3 via AR glasses or something). Apple effectively conceded that for the next two iOS cycles, Siri would remain largely as-is. Tim Cook, on an earnings call, tried to downplay the delay by saying Apple is “making good progress on a more personalized Siri” and that the features will arrive next year (2026)techradar.com. But to users, that sounded like “please wait (again).” As TechRadar wryly noted, Apple has said “next year” before, and it likely won’t placate users who are impatienttechradar.com – especially since “next year” had already become “two years later.”

For frustrated iPhone users like me, this was a tough pill to swallow. It’s one thing for Siri to be behind in 2024 – it was behind in 2023 too, we coped. But knowing that no major improvements are coming for another full year or more feels bleak. It’s basically an admission that “Yep, Siri’s going to stay dumb for now, sorry.” And people are angry. Those forums “overflowing with posts from frustrated Siri users” didn’t calm down after Apple’s update – if anything, the mood worsenedtechradar.com. The Siri subreddit is a testament to that exasperationtechradar.com. One example cited in an article: users complaining that “Okay, Siri can’t even set timers anymore,” which likely refers to Siri messing up such a basic task in some iOS updatetechradar.com. (I personally encountered a bug in iOS 17 where Siri sometimes failed to stop an alarm when I said “stop” – incredibly annoying at 6am. It got fixed, but it erodes trust.) The longer Siri goes without a significant upgrade, the more these anecdotes pile up, the more trust and patience erode. By mid-2025, headlines like “Siri’s absence from WWDC shows it’s still Apple’s biggest failure in 14 years” started to appear (ouch, 14 years would date back to original Siri launch). And honestly, when even the Apple faithful at MacRumors forums start joking that Siri’s new features are scheduled for “the 12th of Never,” you know Apple has a perception problem.

So why the delay? Why couldn’t Apple ship what it promised on time? From what we glean (through reports and some insiders talking off the record), there were multiple causes:

• Quality Issues with the AI: Apple found that its new LLM-based Siri engine just wasn’t performing well enough yet. Craig Federighi, Apple’s software SVP, admitted as much in June 2025, saying the first round of their AI system yielded “inadequate results” and so they had to go back to the drawing boardcultofmac.com. An internal metric leaked out that Siri’s revamped AI was only getting 67-80% of requests right in early testsnews.macgasm.net – which sounds decent, but actually means it was failing 20-33% of the time. Imagine an assistant messing up 1 out of 3 things you ask – that’s not ready for prime time. Apple, true to form, decided it would rather delay than launch a half-baked product. They even subtly threw shade at rivals, implying others might have launched generative AI features with worse performance, but Apple chose to “uphold our high standards” by waitingnews.macgasm.net. I respect the commitment to quality, but the result is still that users are left waiting with nothing in hand. Apple basically concluded it was better to miss the deadline than ship a Siri that might embarrass itself with errors. (One can imagine their nightmare scenario: a Siri that tries to summarize your email but hallucinates details incorrectly – not a good look for a privacy-and-accuracy-focused brand like Apple.)

• Ancient Foundation, Massive Rewrite: It turned out that re-building Siri into an LLM-powered assistant was like trying to rebuild a house without evicting the current tenants. Siri’s core codebase and architecture dated back over a decade – a spaghetti of integrations and hacks built over years to support dozens of languages, offline voice recognition, on-device privacy safeguards, etc. One report said Siri was “practically impossible to overhaul without chaos” because it’s so entwined with iOS’s fabricnews.macgasm.net. Apple did start “swapping in” a new AI engine (Ajax, presumably) under the hood, but they wildly underestimated the scope of the rewritenews.macgasm.net. It wasn’t a simple plug-and-play where they could just bolt on a Transformer model. It required rethinking how Siri parses commands, how it interacts with apps securely, how it maintains context in memory, and so on. Each of those is a huge technical challenge, especially to do efficiently on-device. By late 2024, it became clear inside Apple that they couldn’t just cram the new engine into the old Siri without breaking things. One can imagine the debugging hell: “Ok, Siri can now carry a conversation, but woops, she no longer can toggle WiFi reliably because the intent parser changed.” These kinds of regressions must have cropped up everywhere. So Apple had to slow down and be more surgical, possibly even delaying some features to iOS 19 or 20. In fact, rumor had it that the Siri reboot was supposed to land in iOS 18, then got pushed to 18.4 (a mid-cycle update), then to 18.5, then to iOS 19, and now realistically iOS 20 (if not later)news.macgasm.netnews.macgasm.net. Each slip was an indicator that it’s really hard to retrofit AI into Siri’s bones.

• Apple’s Late Start & Cautious Culture: Let’s face it – Apple as a company simply did not treat generative AI as a top priority until very recently. While OpenAI, Google, and others were pouring resources into large language models in 2019-2022, Apple was focused on other things (custom chips, AR headsets, etc.). It’s not that Apple lacked AI talent – they have a whole ML division led by John Giannandrea (an ex-Google AI guru). But from reports, Giannandrea’s team was more about incremental machine learning improvements and research, not about building a giant conversational AI for Siri. Apparently Craig Federighi (head of all software) was not keen on diverting major resources to generative AI early onnews.macgasm.net. He perhaps thought it was hype or that Apple should wait until the tech matures. By the time ChatGPT proved the world-changing potential, Apple was on the back foot. There’s a story (reported by Bloomberg) that in early 2023, some Apple engineers tried to get Siri to produce human-like answers using an LLM, and the results were laughable – Siri would say goofy or incorrect things – which made some higher-ups conclude the tech wasn’t ready. That might have been a knee-jerk take, but it slowed them down. Only after the public’s obvious appetite for ChatGPT did Apple shift gears. But shifting gears in a company of Apple’s size (and with its secrecy) isn’t fast. It’s like turning a cruise ship: slow and often overcautious. Apple’s legendary secrecy and siloed approach also hurt them; places like OpenAI thrive on cross-collaboration between researchers and engineers in the open (sharing papers, etc.), while Apple’s AI folk likely toiled in a vacuum due to corporate culture. By the time they opened up a bit, they were behind.

• On-Device vs Cloud Dilemma: Apple is absolutely stubborn about its stance on privacy and performing things on-device whenever possible. This philosophy has many benefits (it keeps your data more private, and things can work offline), but it’s at odds with how rapid AI advancement has happened – which is largely via cloud-based models running on giant servers. Siri today tries to do a lot on-device: speech recognition for English is on-device, as are some smart replies and minor Siri Suggestions. But to run a full GPT-4-level model on a smartphone is not feasible yet (not without a severe cut-down in size and power). Apple’s approach with Siri’s new brain was reportedly to get a smaller model that could run locally on the powerful Apple Silicon chips, at least for many tasks. The trouble is, those models remained too slow or too unreliable for real-time usenews.macgasm.net. Apple is banking on newer chips and model optimizations to eventually crack that, but as of 2025 it’s still “a work in progress”news.macgasm.net. In the meantime, using the cloud could solve a lot (like just use a full-powered model on the server), but Apple worries – perhaps rightly – about privacy backlash and also the cost. (It costs money each time an AI query hits the cloud; Apple would foot that bill if it was Siri’s default behavior, and Apple doesn’t like ongoing service costs cutting into margins, especially for something people won’t directly pay extra for.) So we’re in a spot where Apple’s principles cause them to move slower. They could have just said “heck with it, Siri’s now cloud-based and 10x smarter, enjoy,” but that would break the promise that a lot of Siri’s functionality works offline or privately. Also, philosophically, Apple doesn’t want to be dependent on another company’s AI (like OpenAI) for core iOS functions. Thus they’re trying the harder route – a privacy-preserving, mostly on-device AI assistant. Harder equals longer development time. We see that clearly now.

• Too Much Hype, Too Early: It’s somewhat ironic – Apple got criticized for being too slow to announce AI features, then when they did announce Siri upgrades in 2024, they might have over-hyped it given their ability to execute in time. This is not typical Apple; usually Apple announces software in June and ships it in September of the same year. Pre-announcing something a year or more out (like “coming in iOS 19 or 20”) is unusual and set expectations sky-high. One commentary pointed out that Apple “broke their own playbook” by teasing Siri’s powers so far ahead, likely because they “felt the heat (thanks, ChatGPT!)” and wanted to assure everyone they had big plansnews.macgasm.net. That early hype now looks like a misstep – it put a spotlight on Siri’s absence once the features missed the initial deadline. Critics now say Apple only has itself to blame for the backlash; they could have kept quiet until the tech was closer. But Apple doesn’t like the narrative that they’re behind, so they pre-announced to control the narrative. Understandable, yet risky. Now they’ve had to eat crow and publicly delay, which is much more embarrassing. It’s a rare self-inflicted PR fumble by Apple.

• Leadership Shake-Up: It’s worth noting that Apple responded to the Siri stagnation not just with promises but with personnel changes. In early 2025, Apple reassigned John Giannandrea away from Siri (he’s now focusing on long-term research and other projects) and put Mike Rockwell in charge of the Siri and AI groupnews.macgasm.netnews.macgasm.net. Rockwell previously led the team that built the Vision Pro AR headset – a successful, albeit extremely expensive, product. He’s known as a get-things-done guy, less academic, more practical. Apple also moved the whole Siri team under Craig Federighi’s software engineering org, instead of in an AI research silonews.macgasm.net. The message was clear: “Siri, you are now a product that absolutely has to ship, not an R&D experiment”news.macgasm.net. Insiders say Tim Cook lost confidence in the old approach and basically said, “We need fresh eyes and a deadline-driven culture on Siri”news.macgasm.net. Rockwell brought some of his top people from the Vision Pro team to shake up Siri’s engineering and started a “full-on rebuild” of certain partsnews.macgasm.net. The good news is that this likely will result in more focus and maybe a better end product. The bad news: it’s essentially a restart mid-stream, which again contributes to delays. When management changes, often projects are re-scoped or reset. Rockwell might have said, “This approach isn’t working, let’s pivot,” causing more waiting. But at least someone was actively turning the wrench, as one article said – Siri’s problems weren’t being ignorednews.macgasm.net. Still, we users don’t really care who’s in charge behind the scenes; we care about results on our phones. And those, we won’t see until 2026 apparently.

All these factors explain why Siri’s evolution has been slow and why Apple hit the brakes on delivering the next-gen Siri when they planned. Intellectually, I get it – I’d rather have a working, polished product later than a faulty one now. But emotionally, as a user, it’s still disappointing. It’s like being promised a shiny new car, but then the dealer says “actually it’s delayed, keep driving your old beater for another year or two.” Meanwhile, everyone around me is zipping by in their fancy new EVs (to extend the metaphor to AI assistants). Apple has basically asked its users for a lot of patience. And patience is a diminishing resource in tech.

Siri vs. the World: Apple’s Walled Garden Worries

When I vent about Siri to fellow techy friends, a common retort I hear is: “Well, if you don’t like it, just use [insert AI assistant name] instead.” And trust me, I do. I have the ChatGPT and Perplexity apps on my home screen. I’ve played with Google’s Assistant and others. But there’s still something uniquely convenient about a system-integrated assistant. The ability to invoke Siri completely hands-free, anywhere, by just saying “Hey Siri” (or now just “Siri” after a recent change) – that’s something third-party apps can’t match due to iOS restrictions. Siri can also do device-specific things like toggle settings, launch apps, read new messages, etc., which others can’t do as deeply. So I can’t fully replace Siri as the voice control layer of my iPhone, even if I want to. Apple doesn’t allow Google Assistant or Alexa to map to the side button or the wake word. They’re kept sandboxed. Thus I’m stuck with a dual life: Siri for basic device stuff, and other AIs for the heavy thinking. It’s clunky.

This brings us to a crucial point: Apple’s insistence on keeping Siri as the default and only deeply integrated assistant could backfire if Siri remains inferior. In the short term, it forces people to use the subpar Siri for certain tasks. In the long term, it could drive people away from the platform if the gap becomes painful enough. Imagine if, by 2025 (now), Android phones had an assistant that was basically on par with ChatGPT and could be fully voice-operated, etc., while iPhones had old Siri. Some users (especially power users) would consider switching for that reason alone. We’re not fully there yet – Google’s Assistant with Bard is still rolling out, and it remains to be seen how well it actually works. But the threat is looming.

Apple’s argument for keeping tight control is, as always, about quality and privacy. They’d say only Siri can run on-device and thus secure your data; only Siri is tuned for iOS and can guarantee a good experience. However, if the experience isn’t good – if Siri is borderline “unusable” as some claimtech.yahoo.com – then those arguments fall apart. Already, there are calls from some corners for Apple to allow alternatives. I doubt Apple will ever let you fully swap Siri (like setting Alexa as the default voice assistant with the home button), but they might be forced to integrate others behind the scenes (as they are exploring with Anthropic/OpenAI) or offer tighter partnerships. There was that interesting nugget from 2024: Apple reportedly held talks with OpenAI and even Google to potentially license their AI models (Gemini, etc.) for the iPhonetheatlantic.com. It’s almost surreal – Apple considering using a Google AI on an iPhone – but it shows they know the stakes. Samsung already went ahead and baked Google’s generative AI into their phonestheatlantic.com, and as a result, Galaxy users might soon be bragging that their phone’s assistant can do XYZ that Siri still can’t. Apple hates being outdone on user experience, so you can bet they’re weighing every option, including unorthodox ones, to avoid that fate.

One rumored (and later reported) contingency was Apple possibly making a deal with Anthropic. As we discussed, Apple found Claude pretty good for Siri’s needscultofmac.com. By late 2025, insiders said Apple was leaning toward Claude as a fallback if their in-house LLM doesn’t shape upcultofmac.com. Now, Anthropic is not exactly a household name to consumers, but to AI folks it’s one of the top startups (and now heavily backed by Amazon among others). If Apple put Claude’s brain into Siri, suddenly Siri could leap ahead in raw smarts. But there’s a big downside: it would mean Siri sending your queries to Anthropic’s servers, not handling them fully on-devicecultofmac.com. Apple’s entire brand promise around Siri has been “we don’t hoover up your data like Google/Amazon do; we do as much on-device as possible and anonymize the rest.” Using Claude or ChatGPT behind the curtain would directly contradict that emphasis on privacycultofmac.com. Apple would essentially be saying, “We can’t do it alone, we need to piggyback on someone else’s AI.” For a company obsessed with vertical integration (owning the whole widget), that’s almost an identity crisis. Critics would surely ask: what about privacy? Does every complex Siri query now go to a third-party AI who might store some abstract of it? Apple would have to design very strict rules (maybe they’d even host the model on Apple servers or require certain data practices). They know it would be a “black eye… proof positive that the company can’t keep up in AI”, as Cult of Mac bluntly put itcultofmac.com. So that route is likely a last resort – a Plan B if by 2026 Siri still flounders.

From my perspective as a user, if Apple doesn’t significantly improve Siri, I almost don’t care what pride they have to swallow – let me use a smarter assistant. Even if it means a toggle in settings: “Allow Siri to use cloud AI (Claude/ChatGPT) by default – yes/no.” Heck, I’d turn that on in a heartbeat if it meant I could get ChatGPT-level responses through Siri with ease. Apple actually introduced something along those lines in 2024: if you asked Siri something and she couldn’t handle it, she’d sometimes say “Should I ask ChatGPT?” and if you said yes, she’d fetch an answer via the OpenAI integration (with the aforementioned privacy safeguards). I’ve used this, and it works, but it’s far from seamless (and you have to explicitly approve every single time)cultofmac.com. Apple’s reluctance to lean on cloud AI more heavily, while noble, is costing them in user satisfaction. There’s a balance to be had. They often tout, “An average user doesn’t need a super AI to generate a heist movie script; they just want everyday tasks done”cultofmac.com. True, not everyone needs the full power of GPT-4’s creativity. Apple’s stated goal is “AI for the rest of us” – meaning simple, privacy-respecting AI that helps with mundane stuffcultofmac.com. That’s a fine vision, but only if it actually works. Currently, Siri doesn’t even fulfill that: complex everyday tasks (like “send those photos from last Saturday to Mom”) often stump hercultofmac.com. So the argument that “average users don’t need those fancy AI features” falls flat when even average users are annoyed that Siri can’t text the right person or answer a basic follow-up.

If Apple isn’t careful, they could wind up in a position of weakness they haven’t experienced in a long time. There’s a scenario people are starting to whisper about: what if OpenAI (or another AI powerhouse) makes a smartphone? Sounds far-fetched, but consider the pieces: OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman has openly mused that current devices are not optimized for AI interaction. And in 2023, news broke that Altman was in talks with Jony Ive (Apple’s former design chief) to create some kind of AI hardware devicetheverge.comtheweek.com. By 2025, this has materialized into a project: OpenAI acquired a design firm (led by Ive) and they are reportedly working on a device due around 2026theverge.comopenai.com. While they haven’t said it’s a “phone” outright, speculation is rampant that it could be a smartphone-like device (or something wearable that replaces some phone functions). The Atlantic interpreted the Altman-Ive partnership as a sign that “OpenAI’s ambitions [are] crystal clear” – they think smartphones (and computers) are clunky for AI, and they want to “completely reimagine what it means to use a computer,” going beyond legacy products like the iPhonetheweek.com. That sounds pretty darn like an “iPhone killer” mission. In fact, Bloomberg’s Dave Lee called it a “long-shot bid to kill the iPhone” – noting that Apple’s stock even dipped 2% on the news of Ive teaming with OpenAItheweek.com. Now, I’m not saying there’s definitely an OpenAI Phone coming, but imagine if there were: a phone built ground-up to have an AI assistant (maybe akin to ChatGPT 5) at its core, designed by the very guy who designed the iPhone. It would be the ultimate test of Apple’s complacency. If such a device offered an experience where you could just talk to your AI all day and get everything done (without even needing to tap apps much), and it was good, that could appeal to a lot of people – especially younger users who are already integrating AI into study, work, creativity, etc.

Apple’s dominance with the iPhone rests on it being the best overall experience and ecosystem. Siri being behind doesn’t immediately make people jump ship, but if an entire competitor device flips the script – making the AI assistant the main attraction – Apple would be scrambling. I bet this is why we hear of Apple exploring all options (e.g. rumors of them also working on AR glasses with AI, or improving AirPods with AI features, etc.). They know that if they don’t lead in this paradigm shift, they could lose their lead. It’s reminiscent of how BlackBerry underestimated the iPhone in 2007. Right now Apple is the incumbent, and AI-centric devices are the disruptors brewing. Apple surely doesn’t want to be the BlackBerry of this era. They have huge advantages – a massive install base, a tight-knit hardware-software ecosystem, and still a lot of brand loyalty. But I’ll be honest: if in 2-3 years my iPhone still has a second-rate assistant, and there’s another device that offers a first-rate one, I will be tempted. For now, Apple’s bet is that their slower, privacy-centric approach will pay off with a Siri that’s both smart and trustworthy, and that users will wait. I genuinely hope they’re right. I want Siri to succeed, because I love Apple’s products otherwise. But as the saying goes, hope is not a strategy.

Conclusion: Dear Apple, Evolve or Watch Me Leave

Writing this as a frustrated iPhone user has been part therapy, part cautionary tale. I began with a personal grievance – Siri’s decline from groundbreaking to lagging – but it’s clear this is about more than just one feature. It’s about Apple’s ability to adapt to the new AI-centric paradigm that’s sweeping tech. Siri is the canary in the coal mine. If Apple can’t get Siri right, it signals larger issues in Apple’s AI strategy. And if Apple doesn’t bring its A-game soon, they risk ceding their leadership in user experience – the very crown jewel of their brand – to competitors who move faster in AI.

As of late 2025, I’m giving Apple the benefit of the doubt that maybe 2026 will be the year Siri finally joins the modern age. Maybe the combo of Apple’s custom silicon, that Ajax model, and the revamped Siri architecture will surprise us and leapfrog ahead. Apple is known to enter markets late but with a refined solution; perhaps Siri 2.0 will be like that – late but elegant. Tim Cook seems optimistic (perhaps too much so) and keeps assuring us that Apple is “making good progress”techradar.com. But Tim, with all due respect, users are running out of patiencetechradar.com. We don’t want to hear “we’re working on it” for the umpteenth time; we want to see and feel the difference. We want to ask our iPhone something and be delighted by the response, not annoyed.

I titled this piece “Siri, It’s Not Me – It’s You” because that’s honestly how it feels. I haven’t changed that much in what I want from an assistant; it’s Siri (and Apple) that haven’t grown to meet my needs. My needs, by the way, aren’t sci-fi fantasies. They’re fairly basic: understand context, help me automate tasks, answer questions directly, do what the best AI out there can do, but in an Apple-y seamless way. I don’t think that’s too much to ask in 2025. In fact, it’s exactly what the competition is striving for too. Apple must realize that Siri’s tarnished reputation affects the whole Apple ecosystem’s perceived innovation. There’s already a narrative forming that “Apple has lost its edge in AI”phonearena.com, and that’s dangerous for them.

So here’s my plea: Apple, please let Siri be great again. Throw whatever you need at the problem – more engineers, more open collaboration, strategic partnerships, heck, maybe even a public beta program where power users can help fine-tune Siri’s AI by providing feedback on responses (wouldn’t that be something? Apple crowdsourcing AI improvement like how OpenAI uses user feedback – it’d require a cultural shift but could help). Above all, do it faster. Innovate like your company’s future depends on it – because in this case, it just might. When the next iPhone keynote rolls around, I hope to see a live demo of Siri doing something that makes the audience gasp in admiration, not giggle in embarrassment.

If not – if we’re still having this conversation in a year or two, lamenting Siri’s stagnation – then I fear many of us will take matters into our own hands. Maybe by then an OpenAI-Ive device is out, or Google’s AI features on Android become too good to ignore. I never thought I’d consider leaving the iPhone, but if the core everyday experience (of which the assistant is a big part) is markedly better elsewhere, it would be foolish not to. Loyalty has its limits. Apple might recall how it won many converts in the past: by being so much better at certain things (like the touch interface, the App Store, the seamless hardware-software integration) that people switched. The same can happen in reverse if Apple isn’t careful.

In the end, I criticize Siri not because I hate Apple, but because I love what Apple devices enable in my life – and I want them to continue to be the best. Right now, using Siri makes me feel like I’m living in the past, and as a daily AI user, that’s incredibly frustrating. Consider this a love letter and tough love combined. I’m rooting for Siri to rise from zero to hero. Apple has all the resources and talent to make it happen; they just need the vision and urgency. Prove the naysayers wrong, Apple. Give us the Siri we were promised, the Siri we deserve. Otherwise, the next question I ask might not be “Hey Siri,” but “Hey Google” or “Hey whatever-comes-next” – and that would truly be the end of an era.

Curated by Eytan Benzeno

https://chatgpt.com/s/dr_690113fc727c8191990fb66ed9277628

Sources: Siri’s decline and Apple’s AI delays have been widely documented by tech outlets and insiders. PhoneArena and TechRadar chronicled Apple’s repeated postponements of Siri’s “AI upgrade,” noting it’s now slated for 2026techradar.comtechradar.com. Cult of Mac and Bloomberg reported Apple even explored using Anthropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s tech to power Siri, a testament to Siri’s struggles to keep upcultofmac.comcultofmac.com. User sentiment is best captured on forums – threads on Reddit are filled with complaints that “ChatGPT has utterly destroyed… my reliance on Siri”reddit.com and that Siri has become “a complete disappointment” in daily usetechradar.com. Meanwhile, competitors forge ahead: The Atlantic highlighted a 2024 demo where ChatGPT on an iPhone ran circles around Siri, effectively “killing Siri” in capabilitytheatlantic.comtheatlantic.com. Reuters reported how upstarts like DeepSeek’s AI assistant overtook ChatGPT as the top app on the App Store – showing the demand for smarter assistants on iPhonesreuters.com. And Business Insider relayed a former Amazon Alexa engineer’s view that Amazon “dropped the ball” on Alexa, reflecting a broader voice-assistant stagnation that Apple now risks if Siri doesn’t radically evolvebusinessinsider.combusinessinsider.com. The writing is on the wall; Apple itself has acknowledged being behind, with an Apple spokesperson conceding they needed “longer than we thought” to get Siri’s upgrades rightnews.macgasm.net. My hope, and that of many iPhone loyalists, is that Apple uses this time wisely – because the clock is ticking, and the AI future isn’t going to wait for Siri. news.macgasm.nettheweek.com