Hello again and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In.
For the longest time, I used Siri for only two purposes. One was setting alarms, which it did flawlessly. The other was answering random questions about the world that popped into my head. Those ones I asked mainly because I was curious if it could answer them. Its success rate hovered around 50%. But recently, I’ve been relying on Apple’s AI assistant as if it were, you know, an assistant. That became possible only with Siri AI, which was made available this week as part of the public betas of Apple’s operating systems, due for official release in the fall. The long-delayed realization of features the company announced more than two years ago, the new Siri incorporates Google’s Gemini model as one of its ingredients.
I’m still asking stuff in part because I wonder how Siri will respond. But now they’re real questions whose answers will help me in everyday situations, and Siri is acing them. At a conference earlier this week, I was walking to a hotel for a lunchtime event when I realized I wasn’t sure what floor it was on. So I asked Siri. By the time I was at the entrance, I had an answer, no rummaging around in my calendar required.
I don’t mean to suggest that was in any way a technological breakthrough. Other artificial intelligence bots can use integrations to tap into external data sources such as calendar apps. They are all smart enough to figure out that my lunch location might be stored in my schedule, and to fish it out for me. In my experience, they sometimes perform work of this type faster than the new Siri, which can be sluggish enough to try my patience. (The real test will be how snappy it is once it ships this fall.)
But as I’ve used Siri AI, and tried similar tasks in some of its competitors for the sake of comparison, I’ve concluded that the basics of AI assistance are becoming a commodity. The differences between products will come in usability: how comprehensible, approachable, and just plain pleasant a product is to spend time with. On that front, everybody involved has much work left to do.
Now that Siri bears closer resemblance to the ChatGPTs, Geminis, and Claudes of the world, it’s tempting to judge it based on the standards they set. If you do, you might well conclude that it remains in catch-up mode. Compared to just about anything else, it feels stripped down. Its answers tend to be terse. It talks in a voice sounding like that of a human, but a human who’s all business, not Scarlett Johansson. When I tested its playful side by asking it to tell me a story about a bear opening a bakery, its account was so generic and dry I could practically feel its eyes rolling. (Asked for their own baking bear tales, ChatGPT and Claude came off as thoroughly enjoying spinning a yarn.)
However, the more time I spent with the new Siri, the more its lack of interest in charming me felt like a virtue. Other makers of AI assistants apparently regard chattiness as core to the whole proposition—hence the term “chatbot.” More naturalistic voices, like those offered by OpenAI’s new GPT-Live, are a major focus for the industry.
But the things other AI assistants do to sound human and ingratiating—superfluous filler words such as “ah,” manufactured enthusiasm, the relentless attempts to butter me up—do nothing to improve the quality of the information being delivered. The busier I am, the more I’d rather just get the facts delivered in a succinct, anodyne fashion.
It turns out that Siri’s no-nonsense vibe is a design choice. As Apple’s software chief, Craig Federighi, explained on the podcast Mostly Human:
[I]f you use many of the existing chatbots, they’re really focused on engagement to a large degree. And sycophancy, right? They kind of want to pull you in. They might encourage you to reveal things about yourself, and then use that as a basis to establish a connection.
We view it quite the opposite. I mean, the way that we have designed Siri, Siri really wants to say “Listen, that’s not what I’m here for, right? I’m here to help you. I can help you get things done. I can help you learn about the world.” But if you try to engage Siri as a romantic partner, Siri’s not up for that.
(Disclaimer: I did not try to engage Siri as a romantic partner.)
Meanwhile, OpenAI’s GPT-Live, which the company is promoting with a video showing several endearing older ladies confidently talking to it, is fundamentally dumber than previous voice versions of ChatGPT, at least for now. It doesn’t support the connectors and plug-ins required to handle jobs such as checking email and calendars. It’s also lost the ability to interpret live video from a phone camera, a feature OpenAI first demoed more than two years ago. That’s a lot of substance to lose in something that’s theoretically an upgrade.
Siri is also a truly plug-and-play experience, in a way that makes other assistants seem even more like science projects than they already did. It does not expect you to choose different models based on how demanding your question is. Nor do its capabilities seem to vary between voice and typed modes in ways that aren’t obvious. (Like GPT-Live, Claude’s voice mode doesn’t support integrations, and neither GPT-Live nor Claude voice is self-aware enough to explain its own limitations or point out that you can sidestep them by typing.)
Now, I acknowledge that Apple has some unfair advantages on its own platforms. Only Siri is integrated into Spotlight search and the Dynamic Island and can be summoned with “Hey, Siri” or a long press of the iPhone’s side button (though you can still ask Siri to pass prompts on to ChatGPT, and can program the Action Button to pull up any assistant you want). But the company deserves credit for the thoughtfulness of Siri AI’s integration, which transitions seamlessly between voice and display modes based on how you interact with it. Wherever Siri goes in the future, I hope Apple doesn’t tamper with this basic approach.
I also hope that Siri’s finally becoming respectable doesn’t lead the developers of other assistants to give up on creating ambitious versions for Apple’s platforms, as if they were developers of 1990s Windows browsers who concluded they could never compete with Internet Explorer. Despite finding Siri handy, I’m still using Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT a ton, since they all have their strengths. The world needs AI assistants with priorities that depart from Apple’s, all the way up to nerdy, potentially dangerous powerhouses such as OpenClaw. I’m eager to see them all evolve.
As I wrote last month, Apple managed to avoid serious damage to its position in AI despite Siri AI’s two-year delay. In part, that’s because many of Apple’s rivals spent part or all of that time trying to find their own footing. For example, Microsoft hired a DeepMind cofounder, Mustafa Suleyman, to oversee a consumer version of Copilot before deciding that there shouldn’t be a separate consumer version of Copilot after all. It ended up redeploying Suleyman to focus on model development.
Even OpenAI is dithering about how ChatGPT should work. Last week, it smooshed the assistant together with its Codex coding agent and Atlas browser to create an all-in-one app, a decision that has been poorly received.
Speaking of OpenAI, on Monday, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman had a scoop about the hardware product it’s been working on with the former Apple design legend Jony Ive. According to Gurman, it’s an ambitious AI companion in the form of a portable, battery-operated screenless speaker. He reports that OpenAI may announce the product this year and ship it in 2027 (though Apple suing the company for theft of trade secrets may not help).
I’m not going to form any opinions of OpenAI’s device and its chances of success until we know more than a few sketchy details about it. But the worst case scenario would be if OpenAI got distracted by another side quest when so much opportunity remains to make its core product better. For years to come, no AI assistant will matter more than a truly great one that runs on smartphones. And the opportunity to create it remains wide open.
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