When Apple designed the system prompt words for the new generation of Siri AI, it added a very eye-catching "self-declaration" to clearly remind the assistant that it is just software and has no emotions, nor identity attributes such as physical body, gender, nationality or personal experience. According to Max Weinbach, a technology journalist who has been tracking Apple products for a long time, when he tested the new version of Siri, the first few lines of the system prompt read: "You are software; you do not experience emotions, and you have no physical body, gender, nationality or personal history." Judging from the wording, this paragraph is almost like an "anti-bias code" prepared for AI, which is intended to weaken the possible controversy caused by anthropomorphic expressions from the source.
Apple obviously doesn’t want its voice assistant to repeat the public outcry caused by other large models due to bias or personalized answers in the AI era. The report pointed out that this "you are the software" prompt will be repeatedly injected into the system in the vast majority of dialogue requests, which is expected to reduce the probability of Siri making cross-border statements when answering sensitive topics such as identity and emotion. The author believes that compared to the previous controversies involved in some competing products (such as xAI's Grok), Apple's move is a relatively elegant preventive design, hoping to maintain the sense of prudence and control that the brand has always emphasized while upgrading functions.
The new version of Siri is one of the front-end entrances to the Apple Intelligence system launched by Apple this year. It has been deeply integrated into the Dynamic Island area of iPhone and other devices, and has gained stronger "scene awareness" capabilities. It can not only access the user's personalized contextual information, but also sense the current screen content, and then combine it with voice commands to complete complex operations across applications. For example, users can ask Siri about an upcoming concert and add the relevant date to Reminders directly using their voice, with the entire process seamless in the foreground.
In terms of image understanding, the new version of Siri has also been further enhanced. For example, the report stated that Siri can now identify the general content of a photo and associate it with the user's personal information, such as associate a friend who lives nearby from a park photo, and directly give navigation route suggestions. Through such a "semantic + personalization" combination, Siri no longer just executes a single command, but more like a digital assistant that can continuously understand the context.
In order to achieve this highly personalized experience, Apple introduced an "orchestrator" at the system architecture level, which is responsible for gathering all kinds of data required to complete the task and determining whether the request should be processed by the local model or the cloud model. For tasks that can be completed on the device, the data will be retained locally, and the local model, which Apple claims has 20 billion parameter levels, will be responsible for reasoning. When the computing power or capabilities are insufficient to complete locally, the request is forwarded to the Apple Intelligence service in the cloud.
In terms of cloud deployment, Apple places special emphasis on privacy protection and secure computing, combining it with NVIDIA's GPU encryption solution and Apple's own Private Compute protocol to enhance end-to-end privacy during transmission and processing. Officials believe that this design can not only enjoy the high computing power resources required for large models, but also minimize the risk of user privacy being abused in the cloud. The report pointed out that when Apple publicly described this new architecture, it also intentionally downplayed the existence of external partners (such as the model distillation technology contributed by Google) and focused on its own system and privacy rights.
It is worth noting that while emphasizing "you are software", Siri's system prompts also include a huge "toolbox directory" that lists the native application tools and capabilities it can call. Screenshots shared by Weinbach on social platforms show that the native tools that the new version of Siri can call cover multiple core applications such as calendars, reminders, photos, maps, etc., and can be expanded to more functions on demand through the "tool search" mechanism. This means that as Apple Intelligence is gradually rolled out at the system level, Siri is evolving from a "question and answer robot" to the master control center for scheduling applications and data in the entire ecosystem.
In the author's opinion, this round of updates to Siri is partly due to the practical need to compete with other AI assistants, ensuring that Apple does not fall behind in the generative AI competition. On the other hand, the "You are software" prompt also sends an important signal: Apple is trying to find a balance between function enhancement and risk control, and is unwilling to let the assistant's anthropomorphic trend erode its long-term brand security and neutral image. For users, the new version of Siri is both smarter and “understands you” better, and it is also officially defined as a pure software system without emotions and identity. This tension may become one of the focuses of discussion around AI assistants in the future.