I Tried Siri AI on My New Apple Watch and I’m Disappointed.

One of the major features Apple announced with the new Apple Watch is Siri AI, now available right on your wrist! To try Apple’s new and improved chatbot, you need to sign up for a waitlist , and since it was my turn, I tested the new Siri on my wrist. Here’s how it went, and why I don’t think the experience lives up to Apple’s promises (yet, anyway).

Which devices are equipped with Siri AI?

Because Siri AI requires Apple Intelligence, you’ll need a device that supports it. These devices include the iPhone 15 Pro and later, and the Apple Watch Series 9 and later. If you want to use Siri AI on your Apple Watch, you’ll need both a supported watch and a supported phone—a new watch and an old phone won’t work. My phone and watch are running iOS 27 (iOS 27.2 developer beta on my phone; watchOS 27.0 on my Apple Watch Series 12 ). I enabled Siri AI in the Settings app on my phone, which put me on the waitlist. A few days later, I received a notification that I’d been added to the list.

Siri’s artificial intelligence on Apple Watch is sometimes useful, but most of the time it’s disappointing.

After updating my watch to Siri AI, I started asking it a bunch of questions and watched as it struggled to find answers to many of them. My first question was where the nearest yoga studio was; it responded with a list of yoga studios, none of which were close to my home. After several rephrases, it finally identified a studio about a mile away. This is one of those examples where AI is less effective than Google search—or even regular Siri: when I asked the same question to the older Siri model last week, it quickly found the nearest studio.

Then, putting the phone in another room, I decided to try answering a few questions that Apple provides as examples on the WatchOS 27 page. Here’s what happened.

• “What’s the best warm-up for deadlifts?” Siri prompted me with several paragraphs of text about the purpose of warm-ups in general. When I tapped “Show More,” I was taken to the bottom of a long list of exercises. I’m not going to read all that.

• “Read my upcoming events.” It took Siri a full five seconds to process this, but then she correctly listed several of my upcoming calendar appointments.

• “Set a new Ring Moves goal.” Actually, I first asked what my Ring Moves goal was, and Siri couldn’t tell me. So I randomly set a new goal, and later saw that it had updated to the new value in the Fitness app… sort of. When I asked for a 350 calorie goal, it set my goal to 350. When I asked for a 325 goal, Siri said it had changed my goal to 325, but when I checked the Fitness app, it showed my goal was set to 320 calories.

Siri’s AI sometimes worked well on the Apple Watch, but seemed to do a better job on my iPhone.

I then tested Siri’s AI by executing a few queries that other Apple Watch users have reported causing the chatbot some issues. The first was setting a timer; this feature may not work correctly for some users, but it worked quickly for me. The request “Siri, set a timer for five minutes” was executed accurately, with just a few seconds of delay. Similarly, the request “Siri, what’s the weather like today?” instantly returned the forecast.

One of the announced new features of Siri AI is the ability to search your emails and messages for information related to your conversations with her. On my Apple Watch, this feature doesn’t work as well as I’d like. First, I asked Siri what my daughter recently asked me to buy her. (She constantly messages me with requests.) Siri replied that my daughter sent me a wish list of LEGO sets on September 12th. This is true. But only when I clarified, “Wasn’t there a makeup set?” did Siri find that request, which was from September 13th.

Meanwhile, the iPhone version of Siri AI was able to find requests for a wish list and a makeup set and tell me about them in the same initial response, without any additional prompts. In another test of its search capabilities, I asked who I’d sent “Ramona’s dad’s phone number” to. The Apple Watch version of Siri AI found this text message but was only able to tell me the phone number of the person I’d sent it to. Siri AI on the phone, on the other hand, was able to determine that the person requesting the number had introduced themselves by name earlier in the conversation and accurately told me who they were (even though I hadn’t added that name to my contacts).

What are the problems with Siri AI on Apple Watch?

However, many queries don’t work well, or at all. The Siri app on my watch regularly crashes, sending me back to the home screen. Sometimes Siri’s voice cuts out and she starts a message over again. It’s fine, but it’s strange to listen to. Sometimes Siri takes a very long time to “think.” Many queries take five to ten seconds, during which I could certainly pick up my phone and look up the answer myself. Whenever Siri hits a snag, she searches the web and returns a sea of ​​useless text.

For example, I tried to see if Siri could explain the meaning of a mysterious icon on my watch screen. I asked, “Why is this icon gray?” (using different phrasing to clarify that I meant the icon I’m looking at right now ). Instead of giving me any helpful answer or explaining that she couldn’t see my watch screen, she read me some text from the internet about what gray icons even meant. Another time, I asked her to resume playing my podcast. Instead of launching my usual podcast app, she informed me that episode 550 of My Favorite Murder had just aired. I don’t like murder podcasts, I’ve never listened to My Favorite Murder in my life, and episode 550—now that I checked—was the third- to-last episode, not the one that had just aired. (The iPhone version of Siri AI, by contrast, launched my podcast app without a problem.)

At least one feature worked better on the watch: both versions of Siri AI reported no sleep information, but the watch version could at least tell me what time I went to bed and woke up. That’s something.

The promised “Conversations” app also didn’t work as expected. Pressing the digital crown on the watch reveals a mini app drawer, centered on Siri, surrounded by a few recent apps. Scrolling down reveals the full list (or grid), as before. Pressing this center button should show a list of recent conversations, but I kept seeing “No Conversations.” Later, only one conversation appeared: the one where I asked what the gray icon meant. It was the only question in that conversation, even though I’d been talking to Siri all day.

The work is not yet completed.

I like the idea of ​​the new Siri AI, and the ability to ask clarifying questions is great, especially now that I can interrupt the chatbot to clarify my questions. (“Recommend me two specific exercises for a warm-up before a snatch” got it to stop lecturing me about warm-ups in general.) But the long wait times, frequent crashes, and the bot’s inability to access data stored directly on the device are annoying. Hopefully, the next update will improve things.

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