Siri AI Ships (But Still Beta)
Siri AI is a completely reimagined version of Siri that is more personal and powerful. With detailed responses and rich, natural conversations, Siri AI helps users get more done than ever before.
Built on Apple Intelligence, this new version of Siri draws on personal context understanding to help users find what they need in the moment across messages, emails, photos, and more. And with even more systemwide app actions, Siri AI can help users with tasks such as drafting an email from scratch or editing and sharing a set of photos.
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Siri AI already works seamlessly with apps from Apple’s vast ecosystem of developers. Users can continue to take action in the apps they already use with Siri, like texting a friend in WhatsApp or playing a book on Audible. And soon, users will be able to ask Siri AI to draft an email in Microsoft Outlook, search for a homework assignment in Notability, or add a restaurant recommendation to Tripsy.
With onscreen awareness, Siri AI can answer questions or take actions related to the content on a user’s screen. For example, while viewing their favorite sports team’s website, a user can ask Siri to find all the upcoming home games and add them directly to their calendar. And Siri AI can also use broad world knowledge to get up-to-date information on virtually any topic.
And these advantages sum up why I struggled to understand Siri AI at first. Is Siri AI only passable because it has an unfair advantage due to proprietary integrations that other AI models can’t use? Can it stand on its own as a good implementation of AI for most people? Does it fundamentally reinvent how we use our devices, or is it just a lot of hype for a slightly better Siri?
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I find Siri AI’s underlying models to be subpar compared to the competition: for anything beyond a simple knowledge query, I can’t see Siri AI replacing ChatGPT and its superior reasoning modes combined with web search. For simpler queries – the kind that a Google AI overview could also capably answer – the balance of speed and terse formatting is optimal in Siri AI. If I’m watching a movie and want to know how old an actor is, or if I want to know the meaning of a word, Siri AI is perfect for it and I no longer need to reach for ChatGPT or my personal agent in Open Minis. As we’ll see later, I find the Siri app to be extremely barebones and representative of the state of the art for chatbot design…two years ago.
The lack of an “agent mode” for Siri AI stings, and it’s why I can’t replace my beloved Codex or Hermes Agent setups with it.
However, Siri AI eventually clicked for me for the opposite reason: it can do things in and with apps that no other third-party agent can. Yes, they are simpler actions, and, no, results aren’t always perfect; but if you love the Apple app ecosystem and prefer using excellent native apps to cross-platform web ones, Siri AI is a breath of fresh air in the AI landscape right now.
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By and large, what Apple has built works, and as a user of Apple devices and the new Siri AI, you will never see any of its underlying complexity.
For years, I barely used Siri for anything beyond menial tasks like setting timers or alarms. That has changed with iOS 27, as I now repeatedly use Siri for complex requests and to make sense of on-screen context.
Apple may be the last company to embrace AI. But wow, was it worth the wait.
The new AI Siri came out this week as part of OS 27 for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Mac, and it’s a life changer. A phone changer. It replaces most Google searches, most ChatGPT or Claude interactions, and cumulative hours of fumbling and searching and dragging and copying and finding and tapping and pasting.
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Now that the final version is out, I wanted to see how often it gets things right. It is AI, after all. So I ran it through 125 tests.
By default, Siri uses the Apple models described above, primarily the AFM 3 Cloud model (you can tell the local models can’t do much here because most Siri queries fail if you switch off your Internet connection). ChatGPT is still available in System Settings as an extension, with an option to make it speak using a different voice than Siri’s.
While Apple Intelligence as a whole can’t be turned off, users can opt out of the Siri AI beta at this point if they’d like. If you do this, you’ll be given the option to turn Siri off entirely or to use what Apple now dubs “Siri Classic.” In either mode, the UI for Spotlight reverts to its previous style.
The new Siri experience is so much like Copilot or the AI answers in Google Search that it barely seems worth remarking upon, which is both a comment about how “behind” its rivals Apple is in the AI race and how “caught up” Apple feels now that it has shipped something usable.
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The Siri app isn’t much to look at, but I actually like that about it—I’ve lost track of the number of completely different Copilot apps Microsoft has shipped with Windows 11 and what the capabilities of those versions have been. Compared to that, it’s kind of nice to have a simple, clean, Mac-native app that just presents a chronological list of every question or conversation you’ve had with Siri.
So far the biggest single objection to Golden Gate has been the storage space required to support this. As I’ve shown in my own figures, this could be as low as 10 GB, but is more likely to be around 30 GB. Add to that the 28 GB or so required for the system itself, and that’s a substantial burden on your Mac’s internal SSD.
MacRumors ran an article this morning about this today, and what’s interesting is how different people report different storage sizes for the same devices. Why are some people, running the same operating system, seeing different storage sizes? And why isn’t the size the same on all Macs, at least those running the same processor? My M4 iMac reports 32.22 GB; not that big a difference, but still about 1.6 GB less than my laptop.
I do not think Apple should not have local models. But as it is surely the single largest system component now, consuming about the same space as an entire Sonoma installation, I think it is stingy of Apple to ship 256 GB base storage even on its lowest-priced computers.
See also: Reddit and Hacker News.
I installed Golden Gate a week ago. Since then, I have been noticing an expected battery drain (Siri AI (useless for me), new OS, indexing) that has increased in comparison to Tahoe. This is expected, I know. The thing is that this does not stop, even after more than a week. It has gotten so much worse that the MacBook’s battery is being depleted even while sleeping to zero within hours. It is so bad that it even struggles to get beyond the point of being able to boot when connected to a charger. Eventually, it works, but it is a struggle.
According to pdfu, HomePod Software 27 includes the system behind Siri AI, called “Linwood,” along with new status lights in the Siri AI colors. […] Since HomePod Software 27 is out and Siri AI isn’t available on existing HomePods, it’s possible support will be limited to new HomePod models.
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