{"id":52660,"date":"2026-07-20T11:27:43","date_gmt":"2026-07-20T15:27:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=52660"},"modified":"2026-07-20T11:27:43","modified_gmt":"2026-07-20T15:27:43","slug":"siri-ai-beta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2026\/07\/20\/siri-ai-beta\/","title":{"rendered":"Siri AI Beta"},"content":{"rendered":"

Federico Viticci<\/a> (Mastodon<\/a>):<\/p>\n

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The AI frontier from the two big labs (and – we have to be honest with the numbers<\/a> here – probably SpaceXAI<\/a> and Meta<\/a> now, too) is in a completely different league at the moment. I spent my first couple of weeks with Siri AI trying to convince myself that I could replace Codex with Siri AI, and that was the wrong approach. There is a potential future in which Siri AI can become a more proactive and capable agent, but that’s not what Apple is shipping this year.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Siri AI is a dramatically better Siri for typical Siri stuff. The new Siri understands your commands and nuanced requests better because of the LLMs behind it; it can often perform multiple requests in one go (such as setting multiple timers with one command); the new expressive (and customizable!) voices sound great, and they’re terrific at reading and summarizing notifications. Apple’s first advantage compared to other chatbots is right here: only Siri can integrate with the iPhone and iPad to this extent, so even if the Foundation models aren’t as smart as the competition, Siri can do a lot more for most people on their devices because neither OpenAI nor Anthropic have OSes they can control.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

The biggest issue I’ve encountered is the inconsistency of it all. Very often, the new Siri AI still replies with a generic “Uh oh, something went wrong<\/em>“ error that doesn’t explain what the error was or why it happened. Sometimes, I ask a question via voice, and it errors out, but then a few seconds later, I type the same question in the app, and it’s fine.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

My problem is that, right now with Apple’s own<\/strong> apps, both the index and Siri’s ability to perform actions are very inconsistent. The assistant hallucinates abilities it doesn’t have, and it frequently just doesn’t work.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Dan Moren<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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The good news is that Siri AI is capable: impressively so, at times. In the lowest of low bars, it certainly beats the pants off the previous incarnation of Siri, but its access to your own personal data and all of the app on your phone also unlocks a host of new possibilities.<\/p>\n

But it’s also not without the pitfalls that underlie all LLM-powered chatbots: errors in understanding, hallucinations, and so on.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

The app itself is pretty barebones, letting you view those conversations in List or Grid layouts, select multiple conversations to delete them, and pin or rename any single conversation. In Settings : Siri, you can choose to either open to the overview or to a new conversation and decide whether old conversations are kept for 30 days, 1 year, or forever. It’s a little strange that one-off queries (“What’s the average height of the Norwegian World Cup team?”) are stored alongside more involved conversations (“Can you help me build a specific RSS feed for this site?”); I also ended up with a few orphan blank “New conversations” which I deleted, but it’d be nice if you could filter to find those. Conversations are fully searchable and sync between devices via iCloud.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

John Voorhees<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Despite the current limitations, if you use chatbots as a replacement for Google Search, you’ll probably have a good experience with the new Siri app. That’s because even in these early betas, if you ask Siri something like, “Give me a day trip itinerary for a trip to Chicago this Saturday,” you’re likely to get good but pretty middle-of-the-road recommendations. From there, though, you can drill down with follow-up queries to get something more in line with your tastes. The results include source links you can follow, too. Given the ad-strewn mess that web search has become, using Siri for this sort of thing is a meaningfully better experience.<\/p>\n

The one caveat on Siri’s world knowledge is that it’s roughly 2-3 weeks stale in some places.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

A good example is Music. You can prompt Siri to play a song, but most of the rich metadata in the app isn’t exposed to Siri, which is a shame because it is exposed elsewhere, for example to AppleScript.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n