Tim Cook is leaving his CEO role at Apple in one month, and on July 30 he gave his final earnings call. He chose the occasion to announce that Siri lovers may soon have to pony up to use their favorite AI voice assistant.
Cook said on the call that the new Siri AI is a demonstration of Apple’s “philosophy,” which says that “building AI that is private and based on personal context can change how users find information and get things done with our products in a way that truly enriches their lives.” But if you want your life enriched often, it looks like Apple is going to get further enriched in the process.
After falling on its face repeatedly in its efforts to ship a new Siri product, it was important to Apple’s future that it not compound its previous embarrassments by releasing junk. Fortunately, in Cook’s telling Apple is absolutely bursting with pride over Siri AI, which, as Gizmodo has previously confirmed, does not suck.
Apple has been “absolutely thrilled by the response from people who’ve been using Siri AI in the developer and public betas,” Cook said on the call. Siri AI has not officially rolled out yet, but is available in beta form to anyone with relatively new hardware who wants to try it. From the beta program, Apple has obviously been learning about how much its users might rely on Siri, and—crucially—how much all that usage is going to cost Apple.
In response to a question from analyst Michael Ng about the cost of compute, Cook described the data center situation for Apple: a “hybrid model,” relying on both its own data centers paid cloud service. Cook acknowledged that this has been an area where Apple has been spending money. Then he dropped this (not super unexpected) bomb:
“We’ll see what Siri AI does from the cost side of it. There’s also the ability when people use it a lot for them to move up on an iCloud Plan as well. What the balance of that is [is] a bit uncertain at the moment.”
Apple had already said certain AI camera features would only be available to users with at least a $9.99-per-month iCloud+ subscription.
If you’re used to Siri being the voice interface you use to ask if it’s raining or set a timer, Siri AI will be a much richer experience, rooted in the assistant’s access to your personal information—things like Notes app notes and messages stored in the Messages app. It can finally use all of that information as context to provide useful answers informed by your schedule, your preferences, and whatever details it has about your friends and family members. It’s leaps and bounds more sophisticated than previous iterations of Siri, but it looks like all that sophistication isn’t priced into your device. It’s an add-on.