The recent iPhone 17 launch gave AI, the darling of Apple’s WWDC 2024 keynote and iPhone 16 launch, barely a mention until right at the very end, when Tim Cook mentioned the power of Apple Intelligence.
Sure, Apple Intelligence is alive and well in iOS 26, and it does a perfectly good job of giving you AI writing tools, image generation, Genmoji, Visual Intelligence for identifying objects, and notification summaries.
Ok, maybe notification summaries have been a bit of a sore point for Apple, but by and large, Apple Intelligence does a great job of blending a range of useful AI tools into the options on your iPhone without you having to launch a separate app.
Fly in the ointment
The fly in the ointment is Siri. In a world of intelligent chatbots that can hold conversations, Siri is still a basic voice assistant in comparison. The conversational ability of Siri really hasn’t moved forward at all in the last few years. Rather than continue a conversation, it would rather resolve your request into links to helpful websites. If your question is too complex, it will hook up to ChatGPT and give you a (text-based) answer from OpenAI, but this extra step uses up those precious seconds of my impatience buffer.
It would be so much nicer if Siri morphed into a fully-featured AI companion, like ChatGPT or Gemini’s voice modes. Of course, you can run ChatGPT and Gemini apps on the iPhone without a problem, but having them baked into the operating system as a part of Siri would make the experience of using AI seem more integral to the iPhone.
It also feels like I’m not alone in this. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, was recently asked if he could get Apple to replace Siri with ChatGPT Voice, and tweeted that he’s “supportive” of the idea.
Of course, he would be. Which CEO of a powerful multimodal AI chatbot with relatively few revenue streams wouldn’t want Apple to come knocking on their door with a big cheque book?
It’s been rumored for a few days now that Apple is in talks with Google to give Siri an upgrade and I don’t really mind which AI brain powers an upgraded Siri, just so long as I’ll be able to ask Siri a simple question like, “What’s in the news today?”, and get a reply, not a list of web links.
I want Siri to be able to hold a conversation, search the web, or teach me about a new subject. In fact, I just want it to be able to do everything I can do with Gemini or ChatGPT voice modes right now, and I think Apple has missed the boat.
The iPhone 17 Pro might be the best iPhone for running Apple Intelligence right now, but Apple Intelligence should have been so much more by this point.
