A Pretty Siri Can't Hide the Ugly Truth
Wednesday, February 26, 2025
We’ve been waiting for Siri to get good for quite a long time. Before the emergence of ChatGPT, Siri sort of languished. Outside of the addition of Shortcuts in 2018, it has generally remained at the same level of intelligence since 2015 when they added proactive functionality. Last summer, Apple showed off an all-new Siri that is supposed to understand far more context, be able to access content from your apps, and actually take action for you. We are still waiting for that Siri unfortunately and it is unclear when we are going to get it. At the moment, Siri may have a pretty new animation but it is largely the same as it was before iOS 18 with ChatGPT tacked on as a fallback.
We know that Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI have taken things to the next level over the past few years while others have fallen behind. Note that I said “others,” because it hadn’t just been Apple. Much like Siri, Amazon’s Alexa hadn’t really advanced in a while. It was still useful for simple tasks, but it was not a proper AI assistant in the modern sense. Today, they caught up. Alexa+ is the next generation of the assistant and it looks fantastic. It’s powered by a variety of LLMs, runs on existing hardware, integrates with tons and tons of services, and is free for Prime subscribers. That is a potentially devastating combination for Alexa’s competitors. Assuming it works as well as it looks like it does, and I have no reason to doubt the poetic waxing of Panos Panay, it is going to be a formidable opponent to ChatGPT, Gemini, and others. So many people already pay for Prime and with this being included, it is going to be tough to swallow a separate AI purchase. In case you missed it, Alexa+ is not just for Echo devices, it will be an app on phones and a website on computers. It is going to be everywhere. Alexa+ also has an unusually beautiful design for an Amazon product, I imagine we have Panos to thank for that.
So here we are. Everyone is caught up, except for Apple. Siri may have a pretty glowing animation but it is not even remotely the same kind of personal assistant that these others are. Even the version of Siri shown at WWDC last year doesn’t appear to be quite as powerful as Alexa+. Who knows how good the app intents powered Siri will even be at the end of the day when it ships, after all according to reports it has been pushed back and looks like an increasingly difficult endeavor. I obviously want Siri to be great. It desperately needs improvement, not just to compete but to make using an iPhone an even better experience. Other Apple Intelligence features like Genmoji and summarized notifications can be nice, but they’re small potatoes in the grand scheme of things. It is no secret that Apple is not the best at services and their historical ethos makes developing these new kinds of products increasingly difficult. This entirely new landscape presents challenges that are almost certainly already forcing Apple to reconsider the way that they do things. I hope to see the first glimpse of the truly new Siri in iOS 18.4 beta by April, but we’ll just have to wait and see what happens. For now, the real takeaway here is this: Amazon seems to have fixed Alexa before Apple could fix Siri.