Apple’s AI-Powered Siri Could Render Other AI Devices (Even More) Useless
Until now, AI devices like the Rabbit R1 and the Humane Ai badge have been all hype and no substance. Gadgets have largely failed to live up to their promise as true AI companions, but even if they don’t suffer from constant glitches due to rush-to-market strategies, they still have a fundamental flaw: why would I need a separate device for AI when I can do almost everything that is advertised from your smartphone?
This is a difficult task, and it has made me quite skeptical that AI hardware will have any meaningful success. I believe that anyone interested in artificial intelligence would be more likely to download the ChatGPT app and ask it about the world around them rather than spending hundreds of dollars on a separate device. However, if you have an iPhone, you may soon forget about the AI app altogether.
Siri could be the promised AI assistant
While Apple is completely late to the AI party, it may be working on something that will truly succeed where Rabbit and Humane failed: According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman , Apple is planning a Siri overhaul for a later version of iOS 18: Earlier rumors suggested Apple was working on making interactions with Siri more natural, but the latest leaks suggest the company is giving Siri the ability to control “hundreds” of functions in Apple apps: You say what you want the assistant to do ( for example, I cropped this photo). ) and so it will be. If true, it’s a huge improvement over using Siri to set alarms and check the weather.
Gurman says Apple had to significantly reprogram Siri for this feature, integrating the assistant with LLM for all the AI processing. He says Apple plans to make Siri the main presentation at WWDC , showing how the new AI assistant can open documents, move notes to specific folders, manage email and create a summary for the article you’re reading. At the moment, AI Siri reportedly processes one command at a time, but Apple wants to release an update that will also allow you to combine commands. In theory, you could eventually ask Siri to perform multiple functions within apps. Apple also plans to start with its own apps, so Siri won’t be able to interact with Instagram or YouTube in this way—at least not yet.
It also won’t be ready for some time: while iOS 18 will likely be released in the fall, Gurman believes AI Siri won’t arrive until at least next year. However, other than this, we don’t know much about this change at the moment. But the idea that you can ask Siri to do anything on your smartphone is intriguing: In Messages, you can say, “Hey Siri, respond with all your heart to David’s latest message.” In Notes, you can say, “Hey Siri, invite Sarah and Michael to write this note together.” If Apple found a way to make virtually every iOS feature Siri-friendly, it could be a game-changer.
In fact, it could turn Siri (and, to a greater extent, your iPhone) into the kind of AI assistant that companies are struggling to sell to the public. Imagine a future where you can point your iPhone at an object and ask Siri to tell you more about it. Then perhaps you’ll ask Siri to take a photo of the item, crop it, and email it to a friend along with a short description of what you just learned about. Perhaps you’re looking at a complex article and asking Siri to summarize it for you. For this ultimate version of AI Siri, you don’t need a Rabbit R1 or a Humane Ai Pin: you just need Apple’s latest and greatest iPhone. Not only will Siri do everything these AI devices can do, but it will also do everything else you normally do on your iPhone. A win-win.
However, the iPhone is the other side of the coin: these features are power-hungry, so Apple is rumored to be figuring out which features can run on the device and which need to run in the cloud. The more functions Apple offloads to the cloud, the greater the security risk, although some rumors suggest the company is working to make even cloud-based AI functions secure . But Apple will likely keep Siri’s AI-powered features running on the device, meaning you may need at least an iPhone 15 Pro to run them.
The truth is that we won’t know exactly what AI features Apple is preparing until they hit the scene in June. However, if Gurman’s sources are to be believed, Apple’s delayed artificial intelligence strategy could benefit it.