On June 15, Bloomberg’s well-known Apple reporter Mark Gurman wrote on Sunday that Apple’s newly launched Siri has made significant progress. Although it is not amazing, it can alleviate the AI crisis faced by Apple. He said that the current Siri is equivalent to the level of the head AI chatbot six months ago.
Apple Siri
Gurman pointed out that the core of Apple's new AI features is the so-called personal context and screen awareness technology. Based on several days of testing on iPhone, Mac, and iPad, these features have been able to speed up Gurman's workflow on each device. For example, when he asked Siri to adjust his schedule with someone, he didn't even need to mention the specific calendar event name. He only needed to mention who the other person was, and Siri could modify the appointment time, automatically update the meeting title, and change the original conference call access number to the offline meeting address.
In addition to the contextual understanding function, the most obvious change in the new version of Siri is that it finally has logical capabilities. For years, if Gurman asked Siri to navigate to a sushi restaurant, instead of planning a route to the restaurant a few miles away, it would tell him to drive to the Japanese city of the same name, 5,500 miles away. Fifteen years later, the problem has finally been solved.
The new version of Siri can already handle tasks that ordinary consumers would originally leave to OpenAI ChatGPT, Google Gemini or Anthropic Claude, including AI web searches; querying recipes or historical information; asking to edit a piece of text or an email; calculating how much air is needed to inflate the rear tires of a specific car; or asking what movies are playing in local theaters.
Gurman said that the new version of Siri launched by Apple finally achieves the user experience it should have. Although this is hardly revolutionary or innovative, Apple has finally entered the modern AI market, which is worthy of recognition.
He pointed out that based on his experience using multiple AI tools over the past three years, the capabilities of the new version of Siri are roughly equivalent to the level of the leading AI chatbot six months ago. However, considering that Apple has been lagging behind for many years, even reaching this level is already a quite significant improvement.
Gurman said that Apple’s pre-installed AI capabilities are now absolutely sufficient for most tasks, so much so that many users no longer need to use ChatGPT at all. For those heavy users who often use other AI chatbots, they will only open those applications when they need to handle more productive tasks.