Apple (MacRumors):
Unfortunately, due to the Digital Markets Act (DMA), Apple will not be able to ship Siri AI in the European Union with the release of iOS 27 and iPadOS 27. Over the past several months, EU regulators did not accept any of Apple’s proposed solutions to bring Siri AI to the EU while safely supporting other virtual assistants.
[…]
EU users will be able to access Siri AI on macOS 27 and visionOS 27. Developers located in the EU will not be able to test or use the new Siri AI features for their apps on iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and watchOS 27.
[…]
According to EU regulators, the DMA requires Apple to give any AI system nearly unlimited access to a user’s device, as well as the ability to act on that access autonomously without a user’s ongoing visibility and control.
[…]
Apple designed a solution called Trusted System Agent — an intermediary that would allow virtual assistants to safely access the same features and capabilities as Siri AI for devices in the EU. Apple also shared a plan to launch Siri AI in the EU while gradually rolling out this new solution over an 18-month period. The European Commission said no. In fact, the European Commission did not agree to any of Apple’s proposals.
This phrasing is not very clear, perhaps intentionally so. Apple is trying to give the impression that it did all this extra work to meet the DMA’s requirements, and yet the EC rejected its proposals, so it’s their fault Siri AI isn’t shipping in the EU. But it looks like the crux is that the Trusted System Agent is currently vaporware. What the EC rejected is that Apple wanted to be able to ship Siri AI now on the promise of future openness. The TSA would actually be built during this 18-month window of exclusivity. It’s not surprising that the EU would reject that proposal. The App Store doesn’t approve apps that flout the guidelines but promise to comply later. It doesn’t even entertain proposals of the form, “If I built this would it be approved?”
European Commission (via Steve Troughton-Smith):
So first, the decision not to roll out Siri AI in the EU is Apple’s and Apple’s only.
Because absolutely nothing in the DMA prohibits Apple from introducing new products in the EU.
What Apple is however not allowed to do, just like any other gatekeeper, is to close the market.
[…]
Apple simply made a request to the European Commission to be exempted from their interoperability obligations under the DA.
And this for at least 18 months on top of it. Guess what? That’s not an option.
Reuters (Hacker News):
Apple said it detailed its plans for Siri AI to EU regulators six months ago, along with a technical proposal to allow secure third-party access to that data.
“In essence, a commission that’s asking us to conduct a very risky experiment on many, many, many tens of millions of users,” Greg Joswiak, Apple’s marketing chief, told reporters, “and we only want to ship these capabilities when we can do so safely.”
The EU said not to ship it without the TSA, yet Joswiak spins this as the EU asking Apple to be reckless? And if Apple wanted to ship them safely, why did it stop working on them?
William Gallagher:
Apple spoke of having spent hundreds of thousands of engineering hours on changes to comply with the EU. In the new report, though, Apple now says that it no longer knows what to work on.
So currently none of its engineers are working on adapting Siri AI to meet the EU’s demands.
It seems like Apple isn’t taking this very seriously. They’re more interested in trying to score PR points by blaming the delay on the EC rather than on building something compliant. So I guess the EC was prescient not to grant an exemption based on the promise that they’d follow through with the TSA.
Kyle Howells:
However, do I think Apple should be made to open up that level of system access?
Honestly yes. They are worried about protecting my data. But it’s MINE. Me, the user.
Stick a big privacy prompt, maybe a system settings screen and reboot, but I want access to my data!
We can look to BrowserEngineKit to see how well it works out to introduce a trusted intermediate layer that Apple doesn’t itself rely on. And this seems like a much harder problem.
Kyle Howells:
Yeah, that privacy layer is a stupid [non] starter. “Find the place my friend said we should go swimming and give me directions”
The only way that query can work with an intermediary layer is if the AI asks that layer to do the searching for them and only gets the response back.
Except that basically kills the advantage of LLM agents & instead delegate all the ‘smart’ parts to some dumb on device model Apple makes.
Previously:
Antitrust Artificial Intelligence Digital Markets Act (DMA) European Union Greg Joswiak iOS iOS 27 iPadOS iPadOS 27 Privacy Siri watchOS watchOS 27
Apple (Hacker News):
Siri AI is an entirely new version of Siri deeply integrated into iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple Vision Pro. It can draw on personal context understanding to search across messages, emails, photos, and more, and get things done across apps with even more systemwide app actions. Additionally, Siri AI can answer questions related to the content on a user’s screen or go out to the web to get up-to-date information using broad world knowledge and generate a helpful answer. A dedicated Siri app allows users to revisit a past conversation or kick off a new one — all in one place — and uses iCloud to privately sync conversational history across a user’s products.
Apple (MacRumors, MacStories):
Powered by the next generation of Apple Intelligence, Siri AI is a completely reimagined version of Siri that is more helpful, more capable, and more intelligent. With detailed, engaging responses and natural back-and-forth conversation, Siri AI helps users get more done than ever.
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Siri has been rebuilt from the ground up with powerful AI at its core. It takes full advantage of the bold new architecture for Apple Intelligence, including the next generation of Apple Foundation Models that run on device and on servers using Private Cloud Compute. When Private Cloud Compute is handling users’ requests, their personal data is not stored nor made accessible to Apple or anyone else. Outside experts can continue to verify this privacy promise at any time. Additionally, Siri AI uses the system orchestrator to tap into core capabilities like the Spotlight index and App Toolbox, which work entirely on device to keep users in control of their data.
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For products that support Apple’s most advanced on-device model ever, Siri AI offers even more expressive voices, as well as a major boost in accuracy with systemwide dictation. Users have the ability to customize the expressiveness and pace of Siri’s voice so it’s just right for them. Dictation now captures what users say as polished text with greater precision, automatically handling capitalization, punctuation, and formatting as they speak. With improved speech understanding, users can speak naturally and trust that their words will appear clearly, accurately, and as intended.
I remain uninterested in these more advanced Siri features. They matter in that Apple needs to show that they’re not “behind” and that they can actually deliver on what they announce and advertise. But I don’t find the use cases compelling and wouldn’t trust the results.
If you really care about a particular concert, would you believe Siri about how the tickets work and that it will auto-create a reminder at the right time? Why should I believe that it can figure out whether a particular irregularly shaped object can fit inside an irregularly shaped container when said shapes are probably not even published on the Web? Can it really dig into my e-mail to find the right flight info? An answer without being able to see the sources is not useful. And I certainly don’t want it to pick for itself which vacation photos to send out.
I just want the basic features—from a decade or so ago, like music controls, reminders, and access to my purchases—to work quickly, reliably, and offline to the extent possible. I did not hear anything to suggest that this was a focus. Instead, everyone is celebrating how slow the demos were because that proves they weren’t fake.
Ben Thompson:
It’s actually super important that the Siri demo was kind of slow, because it emphasized it was real. Would be even better if it were live, though.
Mark Gurman:
The other interesting thing to note from the keynote: watching the demos, there is ZERO doubt these are real, recorded demonstrations on live devices. There will be no confusion about what is real or fake like there was at WWDC 2024 and the initial attempt at the new Siri.
John Gruber:
In fact, I think most of them were single takes of multiple demos back-to-back. That’s the way it should be, even when they feel a little slow.
Jonathan Wight:
Who the fuck wears a $4000 VR headset to find out if their boots will fit in their fucking backpack?
THATS the best example they could come up for that feature?
Rob Terrell:
also I wouldn’t trust the answer anyway
Kyle Howells:
These Siri demo’s feel like OpenAI demo’s from a view years ago.
However, this is built in to the operating system.
Much like Dropbox vs iCloud, I feel like long term, once it’s good enough Apple will succeed in making AI a “feature” rather than a product.
Simon B. Støvring:
Apple needed to show that they could make a version of Siri that wasn’t three years behind. They didn’t succeed.
Ben Thompson (Hacker News):
And, if your standards are the state of the art in AI circa June 2024, when Apple took their first crack at answering the question, they did quite well.
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What’s fascinating about this specific demo is that it also showed just how far behind Apple is.
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Still, the bubble was strong enough to convince OpenAI to make the exact same mistake Dropbox did: the company somehow convinced itself that it could make enough money selling subscriptions to consumers; Anthropic, meanwhile, realized that it was enterprises who were willing to pay for AI’s massive productivity benefits, even as OpenAI failed to capitalize on their consumer market penetration by refusing to build an advertising product.
This is a long-winded way of saying that I don’t think that Apple’s agentic shortcomings are a big deal, at least for now. Agents help you do work and be more productive, and consumers don’t want to work or care about being productive. What they do want to do is watch short-form video, and an iPhone is simply much better at that than any other device ever will be; in that context, Siri being good enough is enough, and it appears that Apple crossed that bar.
John Gruber:
They need to execute, they need to prove this can scale, and most of all, they need to get third-party apps on board with App Intents and App Schemas. But it seems like they’re doing all of that. This is not a done deal but it is very realistic.
Steve Troughton-Smith:
Siri doesn’t have access to the filesystem or tool-calling, so it’s completely unable to do the kinds of tasks you might easily do with Codex or Claude. It’s a good start, but the state of the art has already dramatically shifted over the past year. The question is will Siri move in this direction, or stick to providing answers from the web?
Will Apple introduce its own distinct Codex-style agentic programming model that can do all this, and work with Xcode? You would hope so…
Aaron Pearce:
Have new Siri now. Siri still can’t do “turn lamp off and turn plug on” in one command.
Joe Rossignol:
The revamped version of Siri that is officially named “Siri AI” will be available to test in the iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, and visionOS 27 developer betas starting today, and it is coming to the Apple Watch in a future watchOS 27 beta. “Siri AI” will also be included in the public betas of each platform that are launching in July.
“Siri AI” requires a device that is compatible with Apple Intelligence.
Hartley Charlton:
Apple senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi has explained why the company launched a standalone Siri app in iOS 27, after previously characterizing a dedicated chatbot as contrary to its Apple Intelligence strategy.
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“We see Siri not as a separate chatbot, just an unintegrated place you go and chit-chat, but rather as an integral, conversational tool that you use in the moment, deeply integrated into your experience.”
Clear as mud.
ldt:
How to bypass the new Siri waitlist (Mac only)
See also: New Siri Waitlist.
Previously:
App Intents Apple Intelligence Apple Software Announcement Artificial Intelligence Craig Federighi Foundation Models Framework HomeKit iOS iOS 27 Mac macOS 27 Golden Gate Privacy Private Cloud Compute Siri visionOS visionOS 27 watchOS watchOS 27 WWDC
Apple:
With software updates this fall, parents will be able to access new child safety features, including a simpler setup experience with a recommended set of essential apps, Ask to Browse, Time Allowances, and a redesigned Screen Time. These updates enhance Apple’s already industry-leading parental controls and underscore its commitment to building a safe and trusted platform for kids.
[…]
For years, Apple has integrated guidance from leading clinical and child development research, as well as online safety experts, into its products and services, and continues to help advance research into children’s digital wellbeing. Apple is working with the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) to adapt its Family Media Plan into a guide parents can reference when using Apple products. Apple also continues to collaborate with researchers to understand the impact of technology on children’s wellbeing, and is committed to advancing the science in this area.
Unanswered is whether they fixed Screen Time so that it actually works now. Currently, it’s a complete mess of settings that get lost, reports that don’t sync, and protections that manage to break sites and apps yet are also easily bypassed. Separately, it’s confusing and difficult to configure, but it seems like that part is improving. It’s hard to believe there wasn’t already a way to ask permission to access a new Web site.
Adam Engst:
To help parents manage how long children spend on allowed apps, Apple has introduced time allowances. A daily time allowance spans entertainment, games, and social media, with each category having its own allowance. Time allowances can vary by time of day and day of week as well, to keep kids from using certain apps during school and to allow more flexibility on weekends.
Does it support weekly rather than daily allowances?
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy:
Apple spending a big chunk of its WWDC keynote on parental controls was surprising for several reasons. But the biggest is that, despite all the airtime, it didn’t announce much new beyond a redesigned interface. Almost all the features touted already exist or are upgrades to current options. Why Apple chose to do this isn’t a mystery. You can trace the threads from the recent landmark social media trials against Meta and Google to the protesters outside the Cupertino HQ today: Apple is trying to show the world it’s being responsible when it comes to your children.
Craig Grannell:
Curious to see Mastodon almost unanimously hostile to the keynote parental controls bit. Maybe I’m missing something, but the vast majority of what was shown was iteration on existing features.
Corentin Cras-Méneur:
AND screen time and parental controls should actually work?? It feels like an early Christmas :->
Previously:
Children iOS iOS 27 Mac macOS 27 Golden Gate Screen Time
