"Is Siri Falling Behind? Apple’s AI Gamble Unpacked"
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Apple has just done their latest developer conference and they made a ton of interesting new AI announcements. But one of the biggest things people are actually talking about with this is some of the AI announcements they didn't make and specifically in regards to Siri, a product that were promised back in 2024 was going to get a major overhaul from AI by today. But

That update did not materialize. Instead, though, they did give an estimation on the timeline and they did reveal a couple other interesting AI products. I want to break down all of what's going on with Apple because I think this is absolutely fascinating. They've actually outsourced a whole bunch of what they're using AI for today to open AI. So I want to break all of that down. But before I get into that, I want to mention if you've ever wanted to

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And I would love to have you try the beta of the AI Box Playground. All right, let's get into what Apple is doing. The biggest thing I think here that everyone's talking about, right, this is the WWDC25 no personalized Siri. They did, you know, show up some cool things. They have this whole new look, which is liquid glass. They have a bunch of, you know, you can...

You can modify how your iPhone looks and all of your icons on there. And that's all like cool and stuff. Apple's SVP of software engineering, that's Craig Federighi. He only gave Siri a very small update. He like, he hardly mentioned it in his keynote address at all. This is what he said. He said, as we've shared, we are continuing to work to develop the features that make Siri even more personal. This work needs more time to reach our high quality bar. And we look forward to sharing more updates about it in the coming weeks.

year. Okay, Sybil, a lot of people were pretty gutted about this because I have friends that literally went out and bought the brand new iPhone because it was dubbed as the Apple Intelligence iPhone with the latest in Siri intelligence coming soon. Apple Intelligence mixed with Siri's personalization coming soon and it has yet to materialize

And instead, what you get a lot of times when you ask Siri a question is it just kicks you over to ChatGPT and is like, hey, well, why don't you just ask ChatGPT this question? I think one thing that's pretty interesting here is the timeframe. So he said the coming year. I think this pretty much means we're not going to get any news from the new Siri until 2026. That's interesting.

a huge delay when we have tools like chat gpt which have you know voice mode on them which essentially is exactly what i'd ever want siri for everything you ask it can give you a response it can send you you know links it transcribes your whole conversation it can tell you about anything that you want supernatural language and when you think of syrian kind of its robotic voice this is completely different so

I think that OpenAI has kind of taken the cake when it comes to this specific feature. Now, Apple is going to do something completely revolutionary, and they probably still will in the future. And this is what I, you know, everyone was excited about. And that's the fact that Siri, beyond just being able to kind of be this voice assistant that can chat with you, like ChatGPT can, it was actually going to take action across your app. So we were talking about, you know,

you know who even need half the startups that exist today maybe they're going to go away because you're going to talk to siri and tell it to do something and it'll go you know complete a task for you without you actually needing to use tools to complete that task is going to be able to go and execute things on apps and access all your personal information is going to know your relationship status is going to know where you work all this information about you and be able to you know be your personal assistant so this hasn't materialized when it does i will be very excited but i'm not holding my breath at this point because apple is notoriously late on

on all things AI. There's a meme going around right now, and I promise I'll stop ringing, putting Apple through the ringer and talk about some cool things that they have announced with AI. But the last thing is this meme that's going around right now, which is the fact that Apple just released a paper where essentially it's a paper saying like, you know, chat, GBT, these LOMs, they don't have true intelligence. They're just really good at pattern recognition, yada, yada, kind of. I mean, I don't know about everybody else, but like, this is what

Merids have known for a very long time. Yes, these things are not actual thinking sentient beings is just algorithms and you know, it's memorizing patterns sure Yeah, like obviously this thing's a robe. You know, it's robot. It's code though. Um, I

Apple put out a whole paper on that and they're like, see guys. But anyways, the whole meme is that instead of Apple coming out with some technology to actually compete in the AI space, they're just putting out papers about how unintelligent these LLM models are, where it's like, I don't know, they're incredibly popular. You know, Chai Chappie has 600 million monthly active users. So obviously this is what users want. So I don't know. I think kind of crap talk in the...

the latest AI tools instead of putting anything out. It leaves bad taste in a lot of people's mouths when their own products are delayed by years at this point, since this new Apple Siri was announced back in 24. So it's a little bit now.

I'll be completely behind. This is never going to materialize. What's the state of it? Bloomberg recently put out a very interesting report that essentially said that there is a version of Siri that is functional. People are actually able to use it. It has this kind of more personalized version of Siri. But the problem is that it is not perfect. And Apple obviously has to be perfect at everything it does. So what they were saying was that of the...

responses that this new Apple Siri gets, only about 66% of them are accurate. So about a third of the time, it's giving inaccurate responses or just not doing a good job. And so, you know, this is the one we're talking about where we're actually going to take control of apps and do things. And I understand this is a very tricky technical problem. OpenAI has done a phenomenal job with their operator tool, which I use

frequently that it's also not perfect, but I still do use it because it helps me speed up a lot of tasks that I do. And then it is $200 a month. So it's not free. You definitely are paying for it. And I just think that it's a tricky problem. I feel like it's gotta be harder for opening out with operator where it's like,

desktop and it's expected to do everything iPhone it's only expected to do things on your phone and iPhone apps which is a lot of software I will give them that but typically these softwares are a little bit simpler UI I don't know maybe it's just me maybe I'm being hard on it because it is a tricky problem but Apple is definitely more delayed than they would like and operators been out for many months now so if you know they were even at the same level as open AI they probably should have probably should have pushed something but they haven't

What does this mean for Apple? Where are they? They officially announced in March of this year that they were pushing back the launch. They didn't say when, but they just said that Siri's update was going to take longer to deliver than they had planned. They also grabbed the SVP of machine learning and AI strategy. They pulled him off of the Siri project and put Mike Rockwell, who had worked on the Vision Pro, in charge of that. So all of this, you know, shaking up the whole company and everything that's going on.

They were showing to a lot of people or telling to a lot of people that Apple's trying to get everything back on track. They obviously stumbled on a major release. And I think this kind of suggests that Apple's AI technology was definitely behind everything coming out of opening. I Google anthropic investors.

Seem not to have worried too much about it, but I would be worried. I think Google takes a pretty hard beating when their AI doesn't do a great job. But Google, to be fair, has an incredible tool with Gemini 2.5 Pro. They've incorporated this into the Google homepage with AI mode. Like, Google is making some big strides, and I will, for whatever, I like to roast every AI company for different reasons, and Google...

of course is a fun one to pick on. But at the end of the day, Google has put out some incredible technology. It works really well and the rolling out to billions of users. And they've also been doing this like for years. They came up with their first AI model Bard years ago or over a year ago. So I think you have to give them the flowers and Apple

has not so it's it's not a great look in my opinion so in the meantime what are they doing right they kind of have this issue they partner with openai um when you ask siri a question and it doesn't know it's going to ask chat gpt instead apple also said that so they were doing this kind of like automated or um image generation and this kind of like ai image generation playground thing they're not doing that in-house they're literally just kicking you over to chat gpt's image generator from openai so they're using chat gpt for literally everything

And then I will say these are the good things coming out of Apple. They did a couple of cool things with AI, again, probably possibly relying on some open AI technology. But I think they're doing a few in-house things that they have working good enough. So here's the cool things. They have on-device foundational models that developers get access to. They have live translations using AI. They have upgrades to their Genmoji, which I don't really care about, but some people probably do.

They had a whole bunch of visual intelligence improvements. They have an AI work art buddy for your Apple watch. They put AI into Xcode. So for developers coding, you have that kind of like GitHub Copilot and all the other people that are doing this.

And they have introduced an updated AI powered version of their shortcuts app. So that's pretty cool. I mean, you can use that for scripting automation and a bunch of interesting things. So they are pushing forward some interesting things. To be honest, I think like the live translation is one that I'm really excited about. I'm very interested in. And so they are rolling out some interesting features with AI, but they definitely are delayed. And this isn't me just trying to, you know,

Bag on Apple. They admittedly are delayed on this Siri project, which I think is the biggest use case of AI, could be one of the biggest use cases of AI if they rolled it out. So we'll be curious to see what this looks like in a year when they finally bring it out, what competitors are doing, because Google has already put AI into their Pixel phones where you can essentially do what the Siri promised to do. You can ask it questions and it could go complete the tasks. So...

Google is already doing this, and I'd be curious to see what Apple plans on doing. You know, because Google came out with, I remember seeing the Google phones, I think six to nine months ago they came out, and now we're still waiting a whole nother year for iPhones to get it. So we'll see where it's at. I think Apple is in a tricky situation. They're making partnerships with OpenAI so that it doesn't seem like they're completely, you know, lost, but definitely a tricky situation. So hopefully they are able to catch up. Thank you so much for tuning into the podcast today. If you learned anything new,

Make sure to leave a rating and review wherever you get your podcasts. And make sure to go check out AI docs.ai, my very own AI startup. We can try all of the top AI models for 20 bucks a month. You don't need subscriptions to every single platform. You can get them all there and use all of them in the same chat interface. You can switch what model you're using mid chat. You can get images, audio, text, all generating the same conversation. It's so useful. And I hope that you love it. Thanks so much for tuning in and I'll catch you next time.