Apple Is Hoping AI Will Solve Its Siri Problem

On Monday, in his last Worldwide Developers Conference keynote as Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook introduced the company’s 2026 software slate, with new versions of the iPhone and Mac operating systems and the features coming with them. Last year was a big event, with the unveiling of the company’s Liquid Glass design language; and though this year didn’t have many surprises, it was still a big deal, with Apple announcing a new version of Siri, the company’s biggest overhaul of parental controls ever, and a bunch of quality-of-life improvements to iOS.To start with the most basic elements: iOS, macOS, and the rest of Apple’s operating system universe continue with the fantastic Liquid Glass design style introduced last year, but improve its usability and add some new features. Settings now has a transparency slider — letting you set the user interface anywhere between unusably clear and completely acrylic — and the defaults have been tuned for improved legibility.The small tweaks come by the bunch. On Mac, windows now all have the same corner radius, the top bar in apps is slightly uglier but more practical, and Safari can sort your open tabs into AI-organized groups. Across devices, Apple’s app icons have been given their annual alterations, Maps has been given a visual refresh, and Windows and Android users can now collaborate on shared photo galleries, with now support full resolution photos. They also introduced a three-band equalizer for AirPods — a concession that the new sound profile on the AirPods Pro 3 was a step down from the Pro 2.Weirdly, despite the focus on AI upgrades, Apple didn’t announce an upgraded, improved, or good autocorrect, which it badly needs. But hey, there’s always iOS 28.The biggest thing is that Apple says this update will make its devices operate much faster. In the presentation, the company said apps will launch up to 30 percent faster — a figure it tested, pointedly, on an iPhone 11 Pro Max — courtesy of software tweaks and a reworked CPU scheduler, which means the improvements will apply to every iPhone since the iPhone 11.Then came the upgrades to Apple’s parental controls, the biggest in years, giving parents far more aggressive and precise control over screen time, social media usage, and which apps and websites are accessible. Though Apple has always been unusually open about the downsides of technology, it’s notable that a phone company is so publicly acknowledging and responding to concerns about excess screen time.“Time Allowances” let parents set how much screen time a child gets across different categories of apps, and a companion Schedules feature locks things down during school hours or mealtimes; parents can also require that minors get approval for each new website and app. Apple has built a set of tools to make it easier for third-party developers to integrate the controls into their own apps. And Communication Safety — the on-device feature that detects and blurs nude images sent to or opened by minors before they appear — will now also block gore and violent content outright.Oh, and Siri is supposedly good now. At Mr. Cook’s first product launch as chief executive, back in 2011, his team unveiled Siri for the first time, and in the 15 years since, the famed voice assistant has seemed to drift further and further from its potential. When it was first unveiled, it was pretty handy, albeit limited, and while Google Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa got more and more capable, Siri has always lagged far behind.With the new Apple Intelligence upgrades — which themselves were announced, and delayed, two years ago — Cupertino hopes to make up the gap. The new, creatively named “Siri AI” runs, like all of Apple’s new AI tools, on modified versions of Google’s Gemini models, tweaked for improved privacy and integration into the Apple ecosystem. That essentially means Siri can pull information not just from your screen but also from your photo gallery, search history, email, texts, and so on, and then act on it using the same tools that power Shortcuts and Automations.Ask Siri when a concert is, and it can pull up the information — then get you the link for the booking page, add a reminder for when tickets go live, text your friends the link, and add the concert to your calendar. Apple didn’t show off any novel AI applications here, but — as is the Apple way — it made those features simpler, more polished, and more accessible than ever before. If they actually work as advertised, that is.You interact with Siri AI exactly as you have with the original Siri, plus typing, and the interface can generate small widgets at the top of your screen, pulled from the apps it’s drawing on. A new, dedicated Siri AI app kind of looks like an uglier, simpler version of ChatGPT, but presumably will get better with time.Siri AI will be available on every iPhone that can run Apple Intelligence — the iPhone 15 Pro and anything newer, so long as you don’t live in the European Union or China, at least at launch — but a more advanced model, with better, more natural speech and richer voice customization, will run only on the current-generation Pro and Air phones.Apple’s wider AI push is a bit mixed, with some encouraging points and many that look pretty bad. On the plus side: an AI upgrade to Spotlight sounds great, and using natural-language descriptions to generate Shortcuts will actually get people to use that app.But there were many duds and points of concern. Quickly vibe-coding Safari extensions with Siri will almost certainly not work as advertised and won’t be used often — and if it is, it would make debugging web issues a complete pain. AI summarization and auto-clip creation in the Home app is cute for making videos of animals walking through your backyard, but that’s not what security cameras are for, and if this tool actually gets used in home-security settings, it needs to be reliable.And then there’s all the AI photo-editing tools, which generally look like slightly worse versions of those available in Google Photos. At least it’s better than the AI generated images in Playground, which look so much worse than what OpenAI, Black Forest Labs, Midjourney, or Google Deepmind generate.The novel feature here is spatial reframing, which lets you alter a photo to “move” where the camera was and reframe the shot after the fact. It’s basically an upgraded version of the gimmicky spatial-images setting, with added AI autofill, but it’s a creative, new feature which should be praised.Even so, I’m not persuaded that, in 30 years, you’ll prefer having a cleaned-up, AI-upgraded picture of your children instead of the authentic original. Visual effects tend to age poorly, whereas photographs, even on old cameras, don’t, and I would bet that this follows the same path.Also, all of these have usage limits, like many AI tools, though the caps rise with your iCloud tier.

Apple Is Hoping AI Will Solve Its Siri Problem

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