Apple's Siri Struggles in the AI Race: A Setback for Consumer Tech

Siri isn't an assistant, it's an embarrassment

Apple's inability to make its signature assistant good, let alone competitive, should have heads rolling in Cupertino. It's time to call it: Siri sucks. And if we're being honest, it's been terrible for years. Apple's voice assistant was so far ahead of the competition that it had every opportunity to basically become the default for a generation. It could have been a brand that encompasses all things of its type, like how all cola is "Coke," all facial tissue is "Kleenex," and every personal watercraft is a "Jet Ski." It could have been a verb, the way every web search is now "Googling it." (The only reason Google's assistant hasn't stepped into that role is that the company can't settle on a brand name.) Now, the company is telling us that the big new Siri features that might have made Siri pretty good have been delayed for a year (maybe more). In the meantime, we don't see any reason to believe that Siri won't continue its pitiful pace of "improvement" that has left it miles behind its AI competitors. Apple should be deeply embarrassed by Siri. It's integral to every Apple device, but it's not a good experience, and it's so far behind in the AI race it leads one to wonder if Apple is ever going to catch up. When asked about AI, Apple will be quick to remind you that, really, it's a pioneer. They've been using AI and machine learning throughout their products for years, ever iPhone since the iPhone X brought dedicated AI acceleration hardware. That's all true, but it's also fair to say the company had no idea at all that generative AI would be so popular or powerful. And so, from image and video generation to text generation and chatbots, Apple is years behind what they're doing at OpenAI, Google, or Meta. Ignoring that Apple's own text generation is mediocre, summaries of notifications and emails are often hilariously askew, and the image generation looks like MidJourney circa 2022, the "other guys" are even doing better voice assistants than Apple. I can have a full-on, free-flowing conversation with ChatGPT or Gemini. I can have them give longer or shorter answers, ask them to change their voice or personality, and more. If ChatGPT had access to my phone functions, it would be game over. With Siri, I have to call upon years of playing Infocom text adventures to phrase my queries in just the right way to make it work like it should. Open mailbox. Go south. Open window. That sort of thing wasn't even on tap for the Siri update in iOS 18, the one we thought we would get in a month or two but has now been kicked down the road to next year. Conversational Siri? Once rumored to be coming in an update to iOS 19 (read: early 2026), Mark Gurman now says it's probably going to be bumped back to iSO 20 in 2027! In other words, Apple is still at least a year and probably two away from delivering the experience its competitors are today. By the time Apple catches up, those competitors will have advanced even further. Apple is safe, but only because the iPhone's core functions and the frameworks that enable access within apps are under Apple's lock and key. Competitor's superior AI can only work on the iPhone or iPad as far as Apple allows, so I won't ever get the ability to ask ChatGPT or Gemini to set an alarm. I won't ever get a hands-free, always-listening voice assistant that isn't Siri, no matter how far behind it is. But Siri's lock-in is getting to be more of a liability than a feature. Siri has been bad for years, and the existence of superior alternatives, and their popularity, is making Siri's failures into an internet meme... and a bad one. Siri's problems started long before the recent boom in LLM-based, generative AI chat companions. Siri has been a disappointment for years. Here's a fun little test I like to do from time to time. Open Spotlight on your iPhone (drag down from the home screen) and type in a flight number. United 800, for instance. You'll get a nicely formatted card of flight info, with an image showing where the plane is in its route, departure, and arrival times, and so on. Now, ask Siri, "What is the status of United Flight 800." You'd expect that same card to pop up, right? Apple has had this great flight info card for ages -- this is a no-brainer. Instead, you'll get anything but flight info. You'll get a general web search, or maybe a news article (as an unreadable notification for the News app), or maybe it will kick the query over to ChatGPT if you have that enabled. Siri will often deliver wrong historical sports scores, incorrect information on a variety of topics, or perform a different function than the one you asked for. There are dozens of memes, TikTok videos, and social media posts of users asking Siri to do one thing only to have it set a reminder or respond with something else unrelated. It also can't do things you would expect it to. If I have a timer running for my bread in the oven, and I say, "Siri, add two minutes to the timer" it will start a new 2-minute timer. If I want to do the math myself, looking at how much time is left and adding two minutes, then issuing the command "Siri, change the timer to 8 minutes," that will work. Frustrating, inconsistent, and unintuitive. I still use Siri every day to add items to my grocery list (which is hit-and-miss and shouldn't be), set timers, and play music. But this is the stuff that has been solved for a decade. Ten years later I'm doing the same things, only with a glowing border around my iPhone display. None of this has anything to do with our new age of generative, conversational, LLM-based AI. Like autocorrect, another feature the casual user associated with "AI," Siri's general functions seem to be getting worse with age. Maybe they're not deteriorating and it's just our expectations that are changing, but either way, Apple has a huge problem on its hands. With its inability to address obvious Siri problems for the last 5+ years, or to even make basic features like autocorrect work in a way that doesn't frustrate users, the world's most valuable company is falling dangerously behind on the biggest technology trend in a generation. Apple has a couple billion users locked into a tight ecosystem, which buys it a lot of time to right the ship, but it has to demonstrate that it can right the ship. We have to see signs of real, meaningful improvement, and a roadmap that speaks to a company-wide vision of AI that is cohesive, futuristic, and exciting. This is not the kind of thing one can usually expect from a company as famously secretive and incapable of admitting error as Apple. So I'm left wanting, hoping for a surprise at WWDC or some other event. A clue, hidden in the subtext of a slick marketing video, is that somewhere within Apple Park they have a bright and audacious vision for AI and a plan to deliver it before everyone else does.

All this bad AI is wrecking a whole generation of gadgets

David Pierce is editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host with over a decade of experience covering consumer tech. Previously, at Protocol, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired. The onrushing AI era was supposed to create boom times for great gadgets. Not long ago, analysts were predicting that Apple Intelligence would start a "supercycle" of smartphone upgrades, with tons of new AI features compelling people to buy them. Amazon and Google and others were explaining how their ecosystems of devices would make computing seamless, natural, and personal. Startups were flooding the market with ChatGPT-powered gadgets, so you'd never be out of touch. AI was going to make every gadget great, and every gadget was going to change to embrace the AI world. This whole promise hinged on the idea that Siri, Alexa, Gemini, ChatGPT, and other chatbots had gotten so good, they'd change how we do everything. Typing and tapping would soon be passé, all replaced by multimodal, omnipresent AI helpers. You wouldn't need to do things yourself; you'd just tell your assistant what you need, and it would tap into the whole world of apps and information to do it for you. Tech companies large and small have been betting on virtual assistants for more than a decade, to little avail. But this new generation of AI was going to change things. There was just one problem with the whole theory: the tech still doesn't work. Chatbots may be fun to talk to and an occasionally useful replacement for Google, but truly game-changing virtual assistants are nowhere close to ready. And without them, the gadget revolution we were promised has utterly failed to materialize. In the meantime, the tech industry allowed itself to be so distracted by these shiny language models that it basically stopped trying to make otherwise good gadgets. Some companies have more or less stopped making new things altogether, waiting for AI to be good enough before it ships. Others have resorted to shipping more iterative, less interesting upgrades because they have run out of ideas other than "put AI in it." That has made the post-ChatGPT product cycle bland and boring, in a moment that could otherwise have been incredibly exciting. AI isn't good enough, and it's dragging everything else down with it. Apple is probably the worst and most obvious offender here. For nearly a year, ever since the company debuted Apple Intelligence at WWDC last June, it has pitched just about every one of its new products the same way: "it runs Apple Intelligence!" The iPhone 16 ads were less about the iPhone 16 and more about showing off what Apple Intelligence could do -- never mind that Apple Intelligence didn't even ship until months after the iPhone 16. When Apple upgraded the iPad Mini, then the iPad Air, it promoted Apple Intelligence as the reason for both. (The also-new base iPad doesn't support Apple Intelligence, and so Apple has effectively tried to bury its existence.) The website for the new MacBook Air promotes three things about the bestselling laptop on earth: its battery life, its chip, and Apple Intelligence. Meanwhile, Apple Intelligence is currently just a couple of writing tools and a way to poorly summarize your text messages. (And, sure, Genmoji.) The feature people actually want, the one Apple has been relentlessly promoting, is a vastly improved Siri that can better understand and execute your requests, even using your apps on your behalf. That feature is nowhere to be found and "is going to take us longer than we thought," Apple spokesperson Jacqueline Roy recently told John Gruber at Daring Fireball. The company pulled a commercial with Bella Ramsey in it that advertised the iPhone 16 Pro using this now-even-further-delayed feature. It's hard not to feel bait and switched by the whole thing. For months, people have seen advertisements for features that don't exist, bought gadgets that don't work the way they're supposed to, and been generally duped into thinking a tiny spec bump was a game-changing upgrade. At this point, of course, Apple is too committed to Apple Intelligence to walk it back, and investors would crush the company if it did. Siri's ongoing crappiness appears to also be the reason behind the delay of Apple's next big product launch. We've been hearing for months about a smart home hub that would leverage Apple Intelligence -- and, in particular, that better, more aware Siri -- to control your house and accomplish tasks on your behalf. (Imagine Alexa, but Siri, and you basically have it.) Bloomberg reported that the device was supposed to launch as soon as this month but is being pushed back in part because the underlying tech just doesn't work. These kinds of context-aware, voice-enabled ambient computing devices were supposed to be what AI made possible. That's why Amazon, too, allowed itself to be totally captured by AI long before AI was ready to be a useful consumer product. Amazon was once among the most interesting, experimental hardware makers on the market -- remember that one year it launched like 6,000 Alexa devices in one day, including a microwave and a wall clock? Amazon wasn't always right, but it was never dull. Amazon hasn't released a meaningfully new Echo device since September 2023, the day the company also announced a new version of Alexa that then-hardware chief Dave Limp called "a superhuman assistant." Since then, we've gotten old ideas on slightly larger screens, with the same problems Amazon has had for years. Amazon was all in on this new Alexa, betting that it could turn its smart speakers from a music and timers machine into something vastly more useful. You wouldn't even necessarily need new hardware for it; your gadgets would just keep getting better. But then, of course, Amazon confronted the reality of the AI situation. It took nearly 18 months of work, and a lot of rumors and reports that suggested AI Alexa was actually pretty terrible, before the company launched pretty much the same thing all over again. Only this time, with new hardware chief Panos Panay doing the talking. And no devices to show. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy promised "beautiful" new hardware this fall but revealed no other details. It's not just big companies, either. For the last year or so, the hottest thing in startups has been "put a microphone on a lanyard, record your whole life, and use AI to do... something with it!" That's the pitch for Friend, and Omi, and Limitless, and Plaud, and Bee, and so many others. Jony Ive and OpenAI are working on some kind of AI hardware together. Investors poured huge money into Humane, only to see that collapse less than a year after its first launch. Rabbit's R1 was a flop. None of these devices have so far been compelling, and some of them just plain don't work. To be fair, product makers are in a tough spot right now. If you believe AI is a paradigm shift, that it will change the world the way smartphones or the internet did, you'd be foolish to wait around for the tech to be perfect. By then, it'll be too late, and you'll have lost the race. The problem is that too many companies have made all their plans based on some theoretical and perfected end state of AI, rather than looking for ways to make it useful right now. There are already lots of ways AI can make products more useful and interesting: cutting-edge models can make your robot vacuum more efficient or help your video doorbell better distinguish between people and tree branches. AI can make your smart lights a lot smarter or figure out what you're cooking and get the sear just right. In all these cases, though, AI is an enabling technology for some other feature -- not the feature itself. Nobody's buying a smart grill for the AI; they're buying it for the steaks. Maybe someday, "you can do AI with it" will be a selling point for gadgets. In the interim phase, it feels like we're wasting an entire generation of hardware while we wait for the software to catch up. And there are so many other interesting problems to solve! What if, instead of hand-wavey promises about AI, we got smartphones that lasted twice as long or didn't break so easily? What if startups focused less on AI and more on the millions of people looking for devices that are less addictive and more attuned to a specific purpose? What if Amazon and Apple stopped waiting for some magical technological overhaul and spent time making their existing devices easier to use? There's still so much room for innovation and improvement in the hardware we use every day, and yet nobody wants to try that stuff. They'd rather sit around and wait for AI to solve all our problems. No matter how long it takes.

Everyone is a loser in the Apple Intelligence race

There's a lot of AI out there, but picking winners and losers isn't that simple Apple Intelligence is seemingly being lapped in the AI race, but it's hard to determine who's really winning when the competitors change the victory condition every few laps. Humans are a tribal species that thrives on competition and debate, and it's no different when it comes to technology. Whether you're talking about Android versus iPhone or PlayStation versus Xbox, people love to pick sides. It's no different for the various artificial intelligence systems available. However, almost universally, it seems people and pundits are calling Apple Intelligence the biggest loser -- even when compared to systems that haven't released yet. I remember when this whole "Artificial Intelligence" thing started. It was and still is a bad name for an evolution of technology that has nothing to do with computers knowing anything. Intelligence is literally defined as the ability to acquire and apply knowledge or skills. Artificial Intelligence does neither. The so-called "artificial intelligence" is just a brute-force technology that works best when it has access to mass amounts of data stolen by mostly large corporations from the web. It can't think, it can't reason, and it doesn't have knowledge -- it has access to knowledge. It then parses that knowledge into a soup that sometimes makes sense, and sometimes doesn't. But it does it so confidently, that Google likes to put it forth as gospel, eager for people to scoop up, right or wrong, credited or not. I'll say it up front in case anyone is confused. I'm not here to defend Apple's current state in Apple Intelligence. Let's be frank -- Apple's position isn't ideal, and I'm not going to try and convince anyone it's getting an unfair bad rap. It deserves the criticism it gets. There is a narrative going around that Apple wasn't even thinking of this technology until pressure mounted in late 2023. While it is possible Apple wasn't targeting a 2024 release, I doubt they completely missed that ChatGPT and Google Bard were part of a zeitgeist. Apple has been working on computational photography for many iPhone generations, from the bokeh effect introduced with iPhone 7's dual cameras to the intensive camera systems on iPhone 16 Pro Max. These advancements in iPhone photography necessitated a new chipset that would take the load off of the GPU -- the Neural Engine. The Neural Engine debuted in the iPhone 8 with the A11 Bionic. While no one was calling these advanced models "AI" at the time, it was the foundation of the technology we use today. OpenAI began research for generative AI models in 2016, which is when Apple, Google, and Qualcomm also announced similar research projects. Apple revealed it was researching AI in December 2016, revealed the Neural Engine in 2017, then ChatGPT was released in 2022, and Apple Intelligence in 2024. That doesn't mean Apple didn't already have so-called AI before Apple Intelligence. A lot of early AI wasn't even generative. Google and others were waltzing on stage talking about AI when the technology they showed wasn't fundamentally different from the advanced ML used on iPhone at the time. Apple wasn't behind on AI in 2016, 2022, or 2024, it's been in the game since it started work on Project Titan in approximately 2015. For those that have already forgotten, Apple had always planned on it being an autonomous driving unit with AI. Increasing pressure to announce something, anything related to AI in 2023, seemingly forced Apple's hand. It can be seen in how the company talked about AI before WWDC 2024. The executives even went out of their way to avoid saying AI to the point it was a running joke in the tech community. Then suddenly, everyone at Apple was saying "AI." An internal adjustment occurred as they came up with their strategy on the fly. Market pressures from the stockholders, customers, and global influences forced Apple to come to the uncomfortable conclusion that the iOS cycle they had planned wasn't going to work. Apple Intelligence had to be revealed in June or the company would face incredible pushback. Without AI, Apple was "behind" and people would turn to competitors that offered access to this new popular technology. Let's not forget that at the time the existing models were doing little more than producing wild hallucinations and poorly conceived student essays. Even so, Google and OpenAI were promising a technology so grand and dangerous it could destroy humanity, eliminate all work, and collapse economies. While this Skynet level of AI never showed up, people ate up the idea, and Apple wasn't part of the conversation. Tech folk kept repeating the lie that AI was changing the world and Apple wasn't going to be part of the revolution. ChatGPT and Google Gemini are hammers, not self-aware computers. They help with very specific situations and make some really cool stuff. I can't help but be in awe at some of the generated images and videos. Interacting with a chatbot can be entertaining and unique, like talking to a video game. Zork writ large. There are people out there producing some really interesting stuff thanks to AI. When the technology is applied to science, research, analysis, and other academic or enterprise uses, it can do amazing things. But let's not fool ourselves. It is already having a detrimental effect on the internet. The real threat of AI from companies like Google and ChatGPT is the death of the information industry as a whole. Google started life with a goal to organize the world's information, now it is using that access to eliminate the need for the web outside of Google search results. It's thanks to companies like Google that we have a web built around ads and tracking users. That ad system pays the bills for publications so information can be researched, written about, published, then indexed by Google. Google has broken that cycle of trust many times over the years. It first did it by boiling the frog, gradually taking more of this revenue for itself, squeezing out everybody else. This has already forced the closure of many, many enthusiast sites, and several AppleInsider employees are refugees from that. It is doing it now by amalgamating several results from multiple sites into one AI summary. It now leads most searches with that, accuracy, accreditation, and payment be damned. Inevitably, the AI will increasingly feed on AI-generated content. This closed feedback loop reinforces specific ideas, eliminates human publication, and ultimately creates a web where the only place you can get any information is from trillion-dollar companies. The only way out of this mess is to stop treating AI like some kind of all-knowing tool that replaces human work. It can accelerate and enhance work done by humans, but it will never replace it. Apple could face a similar dilemma with Apple Intelligence as app intents and LLM Siri are finally rolled out. If users can get all of the information they need via voice interactions with Siri, there won't be much point for opening the app itself. Developers with sprawling UI elements and beautiful design could lose ground to utilitarian single-screen apps that interact solely through generative AI. Apple's on-device systems will be front and center, benefiting from developer's hard work, but without good ways to monetize apps beyond active service subscriptions. All of these companies have a responsibility to think about how the changes brought about by AI will affect incomes the world over. Hopefully they'll all realize that AI can be dialed back in some respects to ensure humanity can still shine through, whether it's via human-written articles or app UI. When Apple finally revealed Apple Intelligence, I was excited by everything they shared. It was on-device, private, secure, and not actively training on user data. Apple's AI tools were smart, if boring. Rather than promise lies like a thinking computer, Apple gave us generative autocorrect, writing tools, and system-wide summaries. Image Playground was and is a terrible attempt at competing on that front. It was somewhat excusable during the beta cycle, but nothing has changed since that bad superhero Mom example during WWDC, and that's not sustainable when competitors release new versions constantly. Though, I do think Image Playground needed to release to help see how users would take advantage of the model, kind of like Animoji or Memoji. It acted as a working example of Apple Intelligence in something more tangible than grammar checks. But yes, the images it makes are terrible if not horrific. Genmoji is neat and useful though. Apple even tied ChatGPT into Siri and its Apple Intelligence tools, but in a smart way that ensures user privacy. The implementation isn't dissimilar to how Siri calls out to Google privately to conduct a search. Of course, none of this mattered because the doom patrol was out in force to say how behind Apple was. Sure, it couldn't make a Pixar-grade image from a prompt, but the other tools were useful and most importantly, built into the devices they already owned. From the September release to today, many people have discussed just how far behind Apple is in this AI race. I think it comes down to a perception issue. Outwardly, Apple is behind. Why is anybody's guess. Apple isn't shipping new, obtusely named models every week with granular improvements and made-up new milestones. The executives aren't promising to end humanity's need for work. Apple is doing what it does best -- working internally until something is ready, then releasing. In fact, Apple Intelligence might be one of the few examples of Apple releasing something before it was ready. My guess is that they had planned to announce all this at WWDC 2025, and we'd have gotten a more polished version of what we have today this fall. Instead, Apple has been trying to get something new to say about Apple Intelligence with every iOS 18 release. It's all been done in the name of playing catch-up with competitors that aren't even following the rules of their own race. They invent new terms and new goalposts to celebrate empty victories at every turn. It's all very disingenuous, and AI fatigue has already set in. I ask everyone all the time, here, in the AppleInsider Podcast, among friends and family, and even just people I'm conversing with in public - "what have you done with AI?" Really think about it. People don't know what AI is for or what it can do for them, just that it's supposed to be good and Apple is behind. "It's Brawndo, it's got electrolytes." I've tinkered with AI from other companies, and they're interesting, but I've not found anything that'll help me directly. To be fair, I'm not exactly the target audience for many of the offered tools. I'm not coding with GitHub Copilot or flooding the internet with slop images and articles in an attempt to make pennies in ad revenue. I am writing, though, and I am using Apple products. So, the only AI that's made any difference in my life is actually Apple Intelligence. It's not huge, and I'm not yelling from the rooftops or anything, but it is a difference. But that's okay, because it is having a positive effect in my workflows without sacrificing anything, and that's what good technology is about. It doesn't always have to be a big deal. Summaries on notifications and mail, even when wrong, are useful for triage. Instead of getting a Slack notification that's so long it ends in an ellipsis, I just get the gist in a summary. We're awash with email here at AppleInsider. Hundreds if not thousands a day. I can see what the actual point of whatever random email I get without opening it. Apple Home isn't packing my notifications thanks to grouping and summaries. Writing tools have replaced Grammarly, a $150 per year subscription. And, for what it's worth, Grammarly got worse when it implemented artificial intelligence. I can take a screenshot of a table on a website, ask Siri to send it to ChatGPT, and give me the HTML version of that table, and get it. It still needs to be deeply proofread to be sure it's accurate, but it's faster than creating that table from scratch, and hand-coding the HTML. These are quaint use cases and not stealing jobs or disrupting the market, but they are tangible. For my needs, Apple is winning, and that's enough. Perhaps it's not that different from my use of iPad Pro as my main computer. There are more powerful devices that can do more, but I don't need them. That doesn't mean iPad Pro is behind those other products, it's just a different platform and strategy. It is quite funny to me to see everyone praising Amazon on Alexa+ when all they've seen is canned demos and a few tech reporters playing with it. I'll reserve judgement for when it's out in the wild on exactly how it compares to the competition. For whatever reason, Amazon has been completely excluded from the AI conversation, if only because everyone believed that the company gave up on Alexa. It's quite the turnaround to go from layoffs and losing money on a product to endorsing it as the future of Amazon. After a keynote with no new products, everyone is talking about how far behind Apple is again. It's quite impressive, actually. Alexa+ won't start rolling out for another month and several of its features involve reminders and integrations with Ubering, similar to classic Siri. Be excited for the upgrades, sure, but I frankly don't understand the sentiment that Apple is further behind because of a demo. It reminds me a lot of how tech pundits would talk about a Samsung Galaxy release in February being miles ahead of iPhone. The device they're praising is a generation ahead of the fall iPhone, so of course it's got better specs, it is meant to compete with the iPhone coming out in seven months. While it's interesting to see how everything functions while it's all still in flux, I'm more concerned with how it compares once it reaches a steady state. There will be a maturity point eventually, and my expectation is that privacy, security, and access to on-device personal information will have Apple in the lead. One thing others have pointed out and I agree with: the biggest problem Apple has is the same one that bites it again and again. The company's secrecy and need to work behind closed doors just isn't helping in the AI race. OpenAI, Perplexity, and Google Gemini are at the starting line with the other lanes empty. The gun goes off and they're running neck and neck. Suddenly, in the fourth lane, Apple bursts out from underground slightly behind the rest. It leaps out briefly taking a breath only to dive back into its tunnel like some kind of subterranean whale. The racers don't even look back at this odd spectacle as they pass Amazon, its starting line a mile into the race. Amazon starts running as the rest pass. Apple is nowhere to be seen as it's back underground preparing to surface again somewhere later. The crowd sees the contenders and the progress they are making. Meanwhile, everyone is wondering where Apple is in this race. They're nowhere to be seen, and even Amazon is running now. Apple must be behind. I know it is unfair for me to say Apple Intelligence is the only AI making a difference for me because it is the only one built into my devices. That's a whole different discussion the European Union will eventually try to weigh in on. It'll be interesting to observe this metaphorical race going forward. There is an AI ceiling, at least on the consumer side in the near future, so I expect Apple will inevitably "catch up." Now if I haven't beaten this metaphor to death just yet, allow me one last smack. The real loser in this race isn't any of the competitors, but the observers. The discourse has gotten so extreme, so silly, and out of the space of reality, that the consumers using artificial intelligence are the real losers here. We've all been robbed of something precious and had it packaged then sold back to us with a pretty bow and a guise of progress. We were promised a revolution that would be either cataclysmic or life-changing. They said stealing all of the information on the web was necessary to change the world. They even said that it was too hard and too expensive to pay for and properly credit this content, so for the most part, they just didn't bother. Worse yet, the courts bought that argument. We never got that revolution, but they did steal everything. We got better autocorrect and AI slop. They got record profits. Every writer has a footprint, and a style. There are turns of phrase that they like using. For instance, our Managing Editor, Mike Wuerthele, can look at our texts blind and tell which one of us has written a piece without seeing a byline. It's disconcerting to see these turns of phrase stolen verbatim from a piece, mashed up with content from other venues, and then put forth as Google gospel at the top of nearly every search result. If you're a tech pundit looking for a clickbait headline, the only thing that'll get more clicks than Apple being behind is apparently Apple delaying an expected feature. The company bit off a bit more than it could chew with its personalized Siri based on app intents that it showed off during WWDC 2024. It's not coming in iOS 18.4 and likely not at all in iOS 18. The whole concept was built on the existing app intents system that would allow Siri to understand what was on screen or buried within apps. It would allow the system to parse data found in separate places on the operating system, like Contacts showing who your mom is, Mail having an itinerary for a flight, Calendar having an event, and iMessage having a mention of an arranged ride. All this could combine to result in an answer to a query to "when is Mom arriving?" There are a few obvious problems with implementing the technology behind the feature. The system is incredibly complex and, like we've seen with summaries, it is prone to hallucination. And unlike summaries, which are harmless if wrong, this new Siri can't be wrong when dealing with crucial data and actions. If users have to go check the work of the AI, then there isn't a point. All of this was being built on the old Siri model. Siri is still and would still be a machine learning model that accesses Apple Intelligence tools the same way it accesses app functions. And all that will be changing soon enough. Perhaps Apple realized the key component to this app intent system for Siri is having Siri be an LLM as well. Whatever the reason, it isn't coming before June. The level of integration provided by app intents being tied to Siri and Apple Intelligence could have leapfrogged Apple ahead. It would be something visible, understandable, useful, and above all, private. That said, the delay is good news for users. It's a sign Apple has learned its lesson with pushing out Apple Intelligence features that aren't ready for prime time. The need to have AI in 2024 pushed some boundaries Apple was uncomfortable with, and things started breaking. The BBC wasn't happy with notification summaries, and that was a black eye on Apple's efforts. Now imagine that same issue but with getting details of your mother's flight wrong. She probably doesn't want to wait in the airport for a few extra hours, and you certainly don't want to be circling or sitting in a parking lot for half of the day. Of course, this, combined with Amazon's announcements and ChatGPT's 40th new model version this week, has Apple being labeled as "behind" again. In the grand scheme, in the public eye, I'm not going to say that's necessarily wrong, but I wouldn't bet against Apple either. Apple was behind in the smartphone market, the tablet market, the smartwatch market, the headphone market, and the $3,500 headset market at one point. If we're calling Apple behind here even though it is providing tangible benefits for users, so be it, but don't bet against them being a bigger player soon. Apple Intelligence has had a rough start. Public perception places Apple far behind the competition. Delays are inevitable as Apple's need for perfection and security wins out over investor pressures. Meanwhile, I'll continue to benefit from Apple Intelligence and almost none of these other models as everyone yells about how behind they are. I'm excited for what's next.