Apple's Siri Struggles with Basic Queries, Raising Concerns About AI Progress

While we worry about AI, Siri can't answer 'what month is it?'

Apple recently confirmed the delay of the new "more personalized" Siri, which was teased last year at WWDC 2024. And while we argue about whether Apple Intelligence can become as good as other AI tools, Siri still struggles to answer a simple question like "what month is it?" As noted by Daring Fireball's John Gruber after seeing a post on Reddit, Apple's virtual assistant is unable to answer what month it is. I tried it myself and Siri answers with "Sorry, I don't understand." Many other users have seen similar results. To make things even more embarrassing, people in the same Reddit thread have figured out some other questions that seem simple, but that Siri simply can't answer. For example, asking "what is the current month?" results in Siri saying it's "Saturday, March 1, 2025." Some people compared the result with other AI assistants such as Gemini and ChatGPT, and they all answered the same questions correctly. When Apple introduced Siri in 2011, the company described the assistant as something that would let users naturally talk to their devices. However, almost 14 years later, it seems that Apple still hasn't figured out how to make Siri work. The company promised in June last year to launch a brand new Siri based on advanced AI. Apple showed videos of Siri answering questions based on personal context from data stored on the device, such as photos, emails, and text messages. The assistant would also be able to detect on-screen content for better context. All we've gotten so far is a new animation that disguises the same old Siri. I really hope that Apple will finally focus on fixing Siri after everything that has happened since Apple Intelligence's announcement last year. After all, we're still waiting for things that were promised not last year, but in 2011. To wrap up the article, watch the video below at 2:47 and think about Apple and Siri.

Users complain that Siri can't answer even the most basic questions -- here's what we know

Apple's Siri chat assistant is still struggling to tell users what month it is when asked, alongside other basic questions. A recent Reddit post detailed that Siri cannot answer "What month is it?" Instead, the assistant will simply state that it can't understand the question. We tested it on an iPhone 15 Pro Max and iPhone 16 Pro Max, both running iOS 18.4, and found the same issue. Oddly, Siri is happy to give the full month and day when asked about the current date. According to the responses on the Reddit post, users are finding issues with several other requests. For instance, one user stated that Siri would not open Apple Podcasts, instead stating that the app did not exist on the phone. Siri reportedly also struggles to recognize playlists on Apple Music, and asking it to set reminders can have a variety of different effects such as the wrong date or time. However, our phones didn't have these issues when we used the same prompts. These reports have arrived not long after the recent news that Apple is delaying the AI upgrade for Siri until iOS 19. The delay isn't entirely surprising as we have heard claims that Apple's Siri 2.0 was only working "two-thirds to 80% of the time." While the wait for features we were promised by Apple almost a year ago is frustrating, we do get some insight into what the possible functionality of Siri 2.0 might look like. According to reports, Siri 2.0 could be able to locate a driver's license number on command, as well as find images of a child in the gallery with a single phrase. Not only that, Siri was able to precisely manipulate apps via voice commands, such as embedding information into an email and adding recipients. Sadly these features seem to be a far cry from the current iteration of Apple's assistant. There's little doubt that Apple has fallen behind when it comes to AI assistants on phones, especially considering the improvements made to Google Gemini on the Pixel 9 series and Galaxy AI on the Galaxy S25 series. For the time being, we will have to wait and see what the future holds for Siri, but right now things aren't looking good considering it can't tell you what the date is half the time.

Is Siri really that bad? Yes, yes it is

It's true: Siri doesn't know what month it is (and a lot of other things) I'd like it to be known that I hated Siri before it was cool. I've written numerous articles on the subject. I'm an anti-Siri hipster. But when a bandwagon comes along, you better believe I'll be sitting up front. Earlier this week (as spotted by Daring Fireball's Jon Gruber) a Redditor named Guitar Scary started a thread about a one-off but deeply troubling experience with Siri. When asked the seemingly straightforward question "What month is it?" the hapless voice assistant responded, "Sorry, I don't understand." As Guitar Scary not unreasonably puts it, "Apple Intelligence this, Apple Intelligence that. Siri is still just awful." The commenters, predictably, tear Siri to pieces, joking about its inaccuracy ("Behold, Siri now uses advanced machine learning algorithms! So she's smarter? She's just stupid faster," says one.) and offering their own similarly dreadful experiences. Those who repeated the experiment with the same wording got the same result, while slight variations in wording got answers that were wrong in different ways, such as "What month is it currently?" leading to "It is 2025." I tested this out for myself and had no more luck, although I too saw some interesting variations on the uselessness. In my first run "What month is it?", "What's the month?", and "What month is it currently?" all resulted in flat responses of "Sorry, I don't understand." When I adjusted my wording to "What's the month right now?" Siri changed things up slightly, asking "Do you want me to use ChatGPT to answer that?" (ChatGPT was able, eventually and via a different wording, to answer my question correctly.) When I tried yet another tack, asking "Is it January?" Siri showed me calendar entries for the previous January rather than answering the question with a flat, "No." But the badness varies from attempt to attempt as well as from user to user. On a second run, things were somehow worse. "What month is it?" and "What month is it currently?" were the same, but "What's the month right now?" no longer offered to bring in ChatGPT. And "Is it January?", unforgivably, produced the answer "It's Thursday, 1 January 2026." (For the benefit of anyone reading this article in the future, it's currently March 20, 2025.) A colleague also got that last answer on some attempts on both iPhone and Mac. Presumably, Siri thought I was asking when the next January begins, but it's a fairly basic question it should be able to get right after 15 years. And I have no explanation as to why it can reliably tell you the month... provided you ask instead for the day or year first. In either case, it confidently provides the day of the week, the date, the month, and the year. All correct, too. But this doesn't reassure me. I imagine Apple will respond to this bad publicity by making sure Siri can tell you the month... but the fact that after all these years it still needs specific programming indicates far more worrying systemic failings. Siri needs to be accurate, consistent, and intuitive. At the moment it is none of these things. Other questions it didn't answer correctly: Who won the World Series last year? (The Rangers won the World Series 4-1.) When do the NBA Finals start? (The Celtics won the NBA Finals 4-1 against the Mavericks.) Who was the president last year? (The incumbent president is Joe Biden, who assumed office on January 20, 2021.) Who is the NFL MVP? (I can use ChatGPT to answer that.) Siri has been bad for years, and there can be few optimists remaining who seriously expected it to suddenly get better. What is surprising is that it's actually getting worse. And people are noticing. This needs to change, and soon. How does Android compare? Before we get out the pitchforks and flaming torches, we should run a comparison with the tech currently offered by other companies. Maybe "What month is it?" is just a super-hard question for AI/voice assistants to handle. Yeah, no. My pal and colleague Anyron Copeman from TechAdvisor asked that very question to three Android phones equipped with Gemini, Google's equivalent of Siri. And got the following answers: Where next for Siri? As with so many tech matters right now, the answer is apparently to throw more AI at the problem. Apple expects this to make Siri more accurate, not to mention more conversationally adept, which should help when dealing with questions like this for which it does have the data, if you only knew how to ask for it. When Apple Intelligence was first announced, one of the most intriguing elements was a raft of improvements to Siri, including the ability to leverage contextual data (such as other information on the screen, facts it knows about the user, and things previously mentioned in the conversation) to handle queries more effectively. It turns out Apple jumped the gun with this feature, which has been delayed until at least 2026 (a setback that the company reportedly regards as "ugly and embarrassing") and still hasn't been demonstrated to anyone outside the company. With the new Siri looking further away than ever, it's tempting to wonder if Apple even knows how to fix the problem. It had a huge head start in the voice assistant market but has squandered its lead and any goodwill Siri once held as other assistants surpass it in every department and Siri itself seems to get worse with each passing year. Yet the success of other assistants shows that the tech is there, and Apple is hardly short of talented employees, or the cash to buy its way back into a strong position if all else fails. But one thing is certain. If Apple doesn't already regard fixing Siri as a top priority, it should do so sooner rather than later.

Apple's Siri can't even tell you what month it is - Phandroid

Google Assistant, Samsung's Bixby, Amazon's Alexa, and Apple's Siri all have different capabilities. However, at its very core, you would expect them to be able to understand the the most basic of queries, right? Unfortunately, that isn't the case with Siri, which struggled to tell users what month it is. According to a post on Reddit by Guitar_Scary, for some reason when prompted, Siri couldn't even tell the user what month it is. Other digital assistants like Gemini and Google Assistant pulled that feat off without breaking a sweat. But Siri? It basically told the user it didn't understand. That is just downright embarrassing for Apple. The company was supposed to launch a revamped version of Siri powered by Apple Intelligence, but now, we're not even sure if that's going to make any difference. Siri has been the butt of many jokes over the years. It struggles to help users search for things on the internet, instead redirecting users to search result pages instead of surfacing actual, useful information. Many had hoped Apple's revamp of Siri with Apple Intelligence would help. However, Apple has delayed its release, but based on the state of Apple Intelligence right now, we're not sure giving Siri an AI makeover will do much good. Come on, Apple, do better!