Apple Delays “More Personalized” Siri

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Originally published at: Apple Delays “More Personalized” Siri - TidBITS

At Daring Fireball, John Gruber writes:

Here’s a statement I got this morning from Apple spokeswoman Jacqueline Roy, verbatim:

“Siri helps our users find what they need and get things done quickly, and in just the past six months, we’ve made Siri more conversational, introduced new features like type to Siri and product knowledge, and added an integration with ChatGPT. We’ve also been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps. It’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year.”

Reading between the lines, and based on my PhD-level fluency in Cupertino-ese, what Apple is saying here is that these “more personalized Siri” features are being punted from this year’s OS cycle to next year’s: to iOS 19 and MacOS 16.

I’m not surprised or perturbed to see these Apple Intelligence enhancements to Siri slipping. Apple has described them only lightly, but gaining onscreen awareness, being able to take “hundreds of new actions in Apple and third-party apps,” and delivering “intelligence that’s tailored to the user and their on-device information” always felt like tech company promises that I’d believe only once I saw them working for me in the real world.

More generally, I don’t think most people would actually use those features because Siri has let them down for too many years. Tonya and I talk to Siri all the time because of our HomePods and many HomeKit devices, but our usage is extremely limited. I trust Siri to turn lights on and off (sometimes leading to “How many digital assistants does it take to screw in a light bulb?” jokes), set timers, make reminders, and play music, but that’s about it. Even with these use cases, I’m unsurprised—but annoyed—when Siri fails to hear a command, gets part of it wrong, or responds completely inappropriately.

I don’t trust—or use—Siri for anything else because so many attempts have failed. Like Lucy, Siri frequently pulls the football away. Unlike Charlie Brown, I long ago gave up embarrassing myself. I doubt I’m unusual in this regard, and I wouldn’t even consider asking an Apple Intelligence-enhanced Siri to take actions on my behalf until I was confident it could better handle my lights, timers, reminders, and music.

None of Apple’s recent changes to Siri have improved how I interact with Siri, partly because most of what I do is through my HomePods and Apple Watch. If Apple wants us to engage in more detailed and expressive voice interactions, Siri must first rebuild our trust by working far more reliably and consistently across all Apple devices.

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Here’s a suggestion that part of the reason might be related to security due to the ease of malicious prompt injection.

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It’s disappointing, the one aspect of Apple Intelligence I was looking forward to was a conversational Siri I could teach my stuff to.

I do wonder how much further behind Apple might find themselves as time goes by. Getting a slight, worryingly familiar air of a dead Apple product.

I’ve been very impressed with Perplexity’s deep research, these services have really moved on. Perplexity state their focus is upon aiding research rather than generating images or suchlike. Got my money.

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Alison and I have had similar experiences with Siri (or as she often calls it, “Damn Siri” :laughing:) at home. Makes a great cooking timer, especially when you have two or three things going on thanks to named timers; we just laugh when Siri names the timer something other than what we asked for. Not much use for anything else.

For some reason Siri and CarPlay are a much, much better experience. It shouldn’t be so, because commands are issued in a noisier and more stressful environment, and by definition not on one’s home network. (The AT&T wireless network in our home area is pretty fast, but can’t touch the fiber connection we have at home.)

Siri somehow manages to get my routing, messaging, and information requests correct on the first try while I’m driving. It’s not the “more personalized” experience Apple has been teasing, but it’s more like the recognition and response engines are a completely different animal from what I use outside of CarPlay.

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Yes, I use Siri every day, in the kitchen, and in the car much as you outlined. But all during the day from when I’m getting dressed to when I’m cleaning the kitchen.

Not all AI needs to be deep, but a conversational Siri, back and forth, sustaining a focus would be great. And a Siri that could look at my calendar, agenda and email and make some sense of it would be great, shuffling things around etc.

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[Merging discussions from a previous topic… -Adam]

Apple just told Gruber that it won’t be until 2026 that Siri sees improvement from Apple Intelligence (so forget about vastly better Siri with iOS 19 launch or even months after that). :flushed: :man_facepalming:

Daring Fireball: Apple Is Delaying the ‘More Personalized Siri’ Apple Intelligence Features

So I feel like asking myself again: at which point do reasonable and patient believers become just dumb followers getting played? Is Tim Apple in it for the win (as in Steve’s “when we do it, it’s because we do it best”) or is this just marketing fluff from a bunch of execs that have lost their ability to execute?

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Let’s not go overboard—no one is being “played.” No one should be purchasing a new device purely because of a lightly described promised feature.

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I’m just thinking this is not about being “played” so much as being disappointed.

Amazon is rolling out their “Alexa+” voice assistant as of March 7 (or at least that’s when I got the email from them); it is going first to owners of most Echo Show devices, a group of which our household is a part. Amazon targeted last June as their rollout date, and like Apple delayed it.

Both the “personalized Siri” and Alexa+ UI experiences are deep migrations, not bolt-ons as I understand it. The Alexa engine was built on the best technology available 10 years ago, which meant many hundreds of thousands of hand-coded responses followed by many more hundreds of thousands of hand-coded corrections and tweaks. Amazon is deprecating that engine in favor of LLMs that will depend on probability to generate responses and actions. It’s highly likely that rolling it out was delayed because Alexa affects real-world systems—we can laugh when Alexa responds with nonsense, but it’s not so funny when we’re at the top of the stairs and ask Alexa to turn on the lights downstairs…and instead it turns off all the lights in the house when we’re on the second step.

Apple Intelligence may or may not be a magic wand, but I’d rather that Apple delay its appearance in Siri than put out another piece of crapola like Apple Maps 1.0.

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Totally agree. I’d always prefer a delay for what then becomes a refined product over a rushed release of a crappy product.

But in this case, the product was launched already long ago and by now is already deep in junk territory to the point of uselessness — it’s the long promised fix to that product that has been delayed over and over. That said, the actual point I was getting at, is, if this is just another delay or if the long sought after Siri fix is rather the next AirPower.

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I don’t think that’s even a possibility. And I confess I had to do some searching to refresh my memory about what AirPower was!

AirPower represents a rare announcement of an Apple product that was eventually cancelled. There is a much longer line of conceptual products whose descriptions and mock-ups were floated, leaked, or otherwise made their way into our consciousness. Somewhere I have a VHS tape, circa late 1990s, of Apple’s visualization of a future where desktop computing became completely untethered from the desktop and landed everywhere from our wrists to our flying cars. Most of it has emerged in some form, years later, as hard products like iPad and Watch, and soft products like Siri.

AirPower may have started out rooted in Steve Jobs’s hatred of cables and wires, but by the time it emerged as an announced product, it was clear that Apple was a day late and a dollar short. I am still using a 2-way charging pad and Watch charger that I purchased during that era. It does not get warm in use, and lets me know when I’ve laid down my iPhone incorrectly over the coils.

By contrast, the best Apple’s engineers were able to come up with resembled in function an induction stovetop (literally, because of the overheating) than it did a svelte and nifty charging surface that suited Apple’s other products. I believe they had no choice but to consign it to the ash heap, swallowing their corporate marketing pride in the process.

Siri, on the other hand, has been out in the wild for nearly 15 years. In that time it has been extended, but the UI and underlying logic are stuck in that past. Unlike AirPower, which was after all a minor accessory, Apple has wound its tech identity deeply around Siri and voice assistance. They can afford to delay a rollout, and risk eroding the goodwill of people like you and me. But they can’t afford to abandon the improved version, because as others have stated their home and mobile devices are almost completely dependent on Siri.

And in the meantime (to maintain relevancy!), Siri can get worse, and it will get worse, until that improved version finally rolls out.

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Of course, YMMV, but I actually have found Siri to be improving, personally. Certainly not getting worse. Tiny improvements, to be sure. Like for example, it can now successfully add items to the “Trader Joe’s” list, whereas it used to tell me “I can’t find the Trader Joe’s list. Would you like to create one?” And just yesterday, it correctly spelled my cardiologist’s name when I told it “At 10 a.m., remind me to call Dr. (non-English surname here)”. It seems very unlikely Siri just guessed right, but instead found a similar-sounding name in my Contacts and (correctly) used that.

Room for improvement? Sure. A lot. No argument there.

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I gather you still believe they absolutely will deliver. I hope you’re right. I’m just no longer so sure about it. Now I get that you’d perhaps counter with something along the lines of “well they have to” because…

But does that really compel Apple to improve Siri? After all, all those folks have already bought into these devices and iOS. We all already use Siri (to a degree, or not) in spite of all its deficiencies. If you allow me to play devil’s advocate here just one more time: how many people do you know who say that if Siri doesn’t improve soon they’ll dump their iPhones for Androids? I don’t know any such people. Those that gave up on Siri just gave up on Siri, not on iPhone.

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Classic Alexa (as I’m going to call it here) is just a scripting language. Just like (I assume) classic Siri is.

I’ve skimmed through the Alexa developer guides, and when a developer defines an Alexa “skill” it is just a set of keywords and responses. You define specific words, with placeholders for parameters and a service in the AWS cloud (typically a Lambda function) to run in response.

The Alexa system performs the speech-to-text conversion, identifies which skill should process your command (based on which skills you’ve added to your Amazon account), and hands it off to the cloud service, which does the action, possibly sending a command back to Alexa to speak a response. The result is a really great voice-driven UI to cloud services, without any machine-learning or artificial intelligence whatsoever. And it proved to be an incredibly useful system.

Will a voice-driven chatbot based on various large-language models (presumably still able to access Alexa skills already developed) work better than the current system? I guess we’ll be finding out really soon.

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Of course, because I think it brings up an important consideration. Apple has seldom delivered or given up on any given product because people wanted it or gave up on it. No one wanted the first Mac—no one, including the executives at Apple Computer who were aware of the project and kept trying to kill it—until they saw it for the first time.

It doesn’t matter how many users give up on Siri. Apple Inc bases a lot of its marketing identity on that voice and the little pulsing rainbow circle. They will keep at it until they have the Siri that no one knew they wanted—like Apple Maps 2.0.

My opinion is that they could not care less how many people are indifferent to Siri 1 on their devices. It may even make their job of rolling out AI Siri that much easier.

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Yes, I agree. And technical articles I’ve read over the past year have described the huge code base and necessity of coding for new cases that Alexa had not yet encountered. For fun (!) I sometimes participated in the Alexa crowd-sourced correction and enhancement process. It was illuminating to realize how many inquiries we think of as routine had fallen into holes in the Alexa framework.

I think that’s the motivation behind implementing a large language model system. It extends Alexa beyond what programmers and volunteers have taught it, and what it can easily look up on the internet because it has been shown where to find it.

It will be interesting, as you say, to see how it works out. It looks like the current Alexa system will work in parallel, and a user can easily opt back into it. Non Prime subscribers will only have that system, and some older Echo devices can’t use Alexa+. That’s much like the system constraints for Apple AI.

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I had a typical day with Siri yesterday - about 40% of my commands were correctly interpreted. These are always very simple commands (e.g. “Siri, Dining Room lights on”), because with that batting average I don’t even dream of doing anything more sophisticated. I know the commands work, because issuing the exact same command after a failure (and some swearing), it will often work. Maybe I should swear before I give the command? :smile:

My bank once had a promotion where they gave you $5 any time something went wrong. ATM is out of money? Go into the branch and claim your $5. I got about $30 out of them before they ended the promotion (probably prematurely).

Imagine if Apple did something like this. You’d have to give up some privacy, presumably, like allowing recordings to be accessible to evaluate the command, and the result. I’d be signing up in a heartbeat.

I know they’re trying to keep up with the Joneses, but putting time and money into some kind of personalized, advanced version of Siri before basic Siri even gets a passing grade is a waste.

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I’m in the “or not” camp. I try to turn all Siri options off.

But evidently I failed. On my new MBA (macOS Sequoia 15.1), in System Settings > Apple Intelligence & Siri, I have the Siri slider set to Off (and all the other options in the Siri Requests box are gray), and there is a button under Apple Intelligence & Siri labeled Turn on Apple Intelligence, which makes me think that Apple Intelligence is off. Nonetheless, Calendar had an event from Mail and the corresponding message in Mail had some banner about Siri. (I clicked the x in the banner, so I don’t know what it said. But the event in Calendar did vanish.) Is there some switch that I’ve missed that is allowing Siri to send information from Mail to Calendar?

My grocery store (actually five different chains, in two widely spaced locations) used to offer one item free if the scanned price did not match the shelf price. (In other words, if I was buying two of the same item, and the price mismatched, I would get one free.) That offer died years ago, and the mismatches have mounted since then. I suppose there’s no longer the same motivation to get the prices correct.

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This Apple support article seems to be somewhat out-of-date, in that if you have a relatively recent Mac, these settings are now in the Apple Intelligence & Siri category, not Siri & Spotlight. Nevertheless, this appears to work for me:

  • In System Settings, chose Apple Intelligence & Siri from the sidebar.
  • Click the About Siri, Dictation, and Privacy… button. It should be clickable even if you have all the sliders turned off.
  • In the dialog that appears, choose Mail, Calendar, etc. from the sidebar, and turn off the Show Siri Suggestions in application option.

Screenshot 2025-03-10 at 11.59.11
Screenshot 2025-03-10 at 11.59.111312×820 101 KB

(And yes, that’s another button that says “About Siri, Dictation, and Privacy…”, inside the very dialog that the first button opened!)

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John Gruber had a very interesting note on the potential security implications of “personalized”
Siri: SIMON WILLISON ON THE PRIVACY/SECURITY RISKS OF PERSONALIZED SIRI

I hadn’t really thought about this, and now I understand why they may be delaying the updated Siri to deal with these very complex issues.

Dave

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Yep, I noted Simon’s point earlier too. It’s a little hard to wrap our heads around the fact that security with AI often revolves around how they’re prompted.