Apple's Siri Struggles: Time for a Reboot in the AI Assistant Race?

It's Time to Kill Siri

After almost 10 years, Google Assistant was recently axed in favor of Gemini. Siri gets a bad rap -- now is the time for Apple to make a change too. If you've had a passing interest in Apple over the past year, you've likely heard of the company's struggles in the AI race. Apple Intelligence, which arrived slightly late after the launch of the iPhone 16, fell short of expectations, and Apple has yet to deliver the much-improved Siri it promised at WWDC 2024. Siri got a new look and an integration with ChatGPT, but its ability to understand your personal context via emails, messages, notes, and calendar was "indefinitely" delayed earlier this year as Apple is reportedly facing several challenges. Even if Apple delivered a better Siri, would people use it? Despite arriving first, Siri has long been derided by iPhone owners, often the butt of a joke, as Google Assistant and Alexa rose to the top. But if Apple wants its customers to take the supposed improvements coming to the voice assistant seriously, it should consider taking a page from Google and killing it off for something new. Google has no problem with pulling the plug when things aren't working, or priorities change. In fact, the search giant has a history of killing so many of its services that there's a website dedicated to tracking all the gravestones. One of its most recent terminations? Google Assistant. Nearly 10 years since its debut, Google Assistant is in the process of being phased out from every ecosystem it was a part of. Wear OS smartwatches? It's being replaced soon. Android Auto? In the coming months. It's already no longer the default assistant on Android phones. By 2026, it's unlikely we'll see the branding anywhere anymore. So ends the reign of arguably the most effective voice assistant of its time, gone without a care in the world. But Google's decision to kill it, instead of keeping the Google Assistant name, may have been smart. "It's primarily branding," says Chris Harrison, who directs the Future Interfaces Group at Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. "But it underlines a technology reason, which is that the previous generation of these assistants really weren't very much like assistants. Asking for the weather and setting a timer -- not very sophisticated. You wouldn't really ask a personal assistant for those mundane tasks." Gemini is completely different. It can rummage through your emails to find the location of your kid's soccer match, parse through large documents, and when paired with a camera-enabled device, can understand what you're seeing and offer help. Its capabilities are vastly superior to what Google Assistant could do. Apple's goal is to achieve similar results in a more privacy-friendly way -- so that when you have Siri connect to ChatGPT, your data is not passed off to OpenAI. "Apple thought Siri's capabilities would grow, but that didn't really materialize; Siri kind of atrophied out of the gate," Harrison says. "Now, we're in this new generation of things that are really much more like assistants -- they can do reasoning, personalization." But while Google Assistant and Gemini both have voice interfaces, and at a first glance, they may share a similar look, they're two different applications. "Simply renaming it Google Assistant 2.0 would not spur people to use it in a fundamentally different way." It seems that switch to Gemini has been key to moving customer understanding along.

Siri's AI absence from WWDC shows it's still Apple's biggest failure in 14 years

I am going to talk about Terminator 2: Judgment Day in a post about AI, but not for the reason you would assume, so bear with me. I want to talk about John Connor's be-mulleted best friend, Tim. There's a moment at the arcade during which the T-1000 is searching for Connor, and Tim bravely tries to deflect it away from him. The T-1000 elbows Tim out of the frame effortlessly in order to pursue its prey. This is a picture wrap for Tim. He doesn't appear again. He has been glued to John Connor up until that point, but now he's shoved not only out of sight, but out of the movie. That was Siri's role at WWDC 2025, but without the courage. Apple opened with a big section on Apple Intelligence, but we were reminded that the AI-powered Siri has yet to meet Apple's high standards, and that "we look forward to sharing more about it in the coming year". The upgraded Siri's failure to launch is often said to be part of Apple generally not keeping up with the pace of AI development - but while it's true that I've turned off a lot of Apple Intelligence features myself because I think they're sorely underbaked, Siri has a long history of lagging behind the competition. It's funny to think that Siri was borderline the first of its kind. I say borderline, because Siri was an existing product that Apple bought in, so logically the tech already existed - but integrating it into the phone in the way Apple did in the iPhone 4S was new and interesting. I was working on a dedicated iPhone magazine at the time, and Siri was obviously a huge deal: a new way of interacting with your phone, and - we assumed at the time - a new platform that would be developed constantly. This was not, alas, the case. Siri would stumble forward with new features occasionally, but remained largely a voice-activated remote control for timers and maybe sending a message. When Alexa and Google Assistant became the biggest tech platforms in the world for a time, we expected Siri to accelerate to keep up with them. It did not. When Apple launched the original HomePod with Siri on it to compete with the Echo, Siri was far less capable than Alexa, and would frequently get wrong even basic music requests, despite a huge part of the launch being that it had been upgraded to be especially great at music. Oh yes... and the HomePod was announced at WWDC 2017, but was delayed by nearly a year. Apple has often added features and tinkered with Siri over the years, but it hasn't fixed the fundamental problem that it's never really seemed capable of handling anything outside of those basic remote-control requests. I use Siri almost every day, to set cooking timers. Often to turn smart lights on and off. Sometimes to activate Apple Watch workouts if my hands are full. I send a message a few times a year, though I rarely trust its transcription. None of these are meaningful progressions from what it could do 14 years ago. Every time I've encouraged it to explore new areas of usefulness with me, it has immediately tripped and fallen on its face, like a scene in a comedy about rich people who go on a hike for the first time. Next year's WWDC will mark 15 years of Siri, and it's a big 'if' as to whether we'll have seen the new version by then. If we haven't - or even if we have, but it's only been as successful an update as previous versions - it really might be Old Yeller time. Google Gemini is too impressive on Android phones for Siri to keep walking into walls. ChatGPT is working with Apple's own Jony Ive on a new AI-first device. Siri can't be carried forever; and yet, its failure to turn up for the huge WWDC event is just another in a long line of disappointments. Surely this has to end, one way or the other, soon.