What's next for Siri?

One year on from WWDC 2024, all the promised features in the revamped Siri have yet to materialize. What's going on?

- DAVID CROOKES

Apple's 2024 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) promised the start of a new era for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. As well as introducing Apple Intelligence, the Cupertino giant said Siri was going to become more deeply integrated. Siri was set to be more personal and more aware of what was happening on screen. It would use on-device information, work across Apple and third-party apps, and get tasks done with the utmost ease.

Today, those promises are still in the air, with all of us yet to see an Apple Intelligence-powered Siri capable of understanding personal context. It cannot analyze your emails, messages, photos, calendar events, and files, nor allow you to ask questions such as “what was that book Tim suggested?” You can’t ask it to pull data from apps and use it elsewhere, and you can’t look at an email with a restaurant recommendation and ask Siri how long it reckons it’ll take to get there.

Siri isn’t capable of editing your images on your say-so either, and it can’t jump from one app to another. So while it will understand your requests if you stumble over your words; allow you to type to Siri rather than speak and converse in a more natural voice, and make the edge of the screen glow as you issue commands, they’re not quite the groundbreaking features that we were promised more than a year ago. If it wasn’t for ChatGPT’s integration aimed at complex queries, Siri would be severely lacking.

LOSING GROUND

But Siri has been problematic for some time. For years, people have reported how it often mishears and misunderstands commands. Siri is also incapable of changing more than a relatively small number of device settings.