The New Siri is an Improvement, Not Much More

After waiting for years for Apple to catch up and have a credible AI offering, I was hoping for a bit more with the new Siri AI. I’ve given it a good go over the last month.

It works much better than old Siri, but it’s nowhere near as capable as Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini, or even newer local models like Google’s Gemma 4. The private compute and deep system integration is compelling, but it still falls over with basic requests.

To Apple’s credit, the responses are very fast and completely private. Apple’s whole USP with this is that they do not collect or share data, and that the majority of the processing is done locally on-device. This is also a barrier though… Siri can’t learn or build context and memories about who you are, what you do, what you like, or what tone of voice to speak to you in. That is a design choice to prioritise privacy, so you can only get responses that do not feel contextually personalised or are generic logic-based tasks.

Maybe I’m just comparing apples with pears here. The dichotomy is making a choice between generic non-contextualised AI that prioritises privacy, or compromising on privacy to allow a deeper integration for the AI to build knowledge and contextual understanding.

It’s food for thought. I will say that the AI powered Shortcuts app is a game changer!