Two years and $250 million in litigation later, Apple’s AI Siri makeover is making its way to your phones, laptops, and even mixed reality headsets. If you’re one of the three or so people who actually use Apple Vision Pro. Apple revealed a slew of new information during Monday’s WWDC keynote about a long-awaited AI-powered update that could take advantage of the fact that our hardware is supposedly “built for Apple Intelligence.”
To be honest, it’s hard to be impressed by AI enough to use it in our daily lives. I still don’t trust LLMs to consistently provide accurate information. I feel that using AI to assist with writing is ethically unacceptable (and uncool). I also don’t feel an insatiable desire to see what I look like as a Studio Ghibli character. But sometimes the possibilities of AI tempt me.
That’s how I felt after watching Apple’s Siri AI demo. This demo depicts a world where your phone comes with an always-on, always-on assistant that knows everything about you and can track every conversation you have in 12 different apps on your phone at any given time.
To paraphrase Katy Perry, it feels so wrong (what are the privacy implications?) but also so right (I’m overwhelmed by my phone and need help parsing it all out).
I want Siri to be my personal Emily from The Devil Wears Prada, a second brain that anticipates my needs before I even know what they are. When my friend and I decide to meet for dinner on Thursday, I want Siri to read my text and automatically create an event. When you walk by CVS, you want Siri to remind you that your prescription is ready to pick up. If you forget to reply to an important work email, you want Siri to remind you that you haven’t replied yet.
Siri AI won’t be able to do all of this out of the box, but it’s a step in the right direction. In one example at WWDC, Justin Titi, Apple’s senior director of AI engineering, asked his smart assistant to remember a dessert his daughter had recently mentioned. Siri searches Titi’s phone and finds a text from about a month ago in which her daughter said she wanted to make coconut cookies. It’s simple, but asking Siri to find that message saves you time compared to scrolling through a month’s worth of conversations looking for a specific text.
The new and improved Siri is designed to use “personal context.” This refers to any information entered into Apple native apps, such as iMessages, Notes, Calendar, Mail, Photos, etc. Siri also knows what’s on your screen, so if you scroll past a photo of a nice park on Instagram, for example, you can ask it where that park is. (We don’t yet know if Siri can be integrated into non-native Apple apps; it seems like it’s up to developers to make that happen.)
Apps like Poppy and Poke already exist that attempt to create this kind of mobile agent AI. But the paradox of these AI personal assistant tools is that you have to give up a lot of personal data and privacy to make them work properly, which can lead to even more problems (remember when meta-researchers ran OpenClaw and accidentally deleted their entire inbox?).
I can’t say I like giving personal data to tech giants, but Apple at least seems to care more about security than other FAANG (MANGO?) companies. On-device AI is always safer and uses less energy than cloud computing because the data is processed directly on your smartphone. (This produces current Apple Intelligence features such as email summaries and AI emojis.) But for the more complex tasks Siri would face, Apple developed Private Cloud Computing (PCC). This is a way for devices to parse complex data on the cloud without exposing the data to Apple itself. (If hacking PCC is possible, even with Apple offering a $1 million bug bounty, it hasn’t happened yet.)
In a recent conversation with author Calvin Kasulke (who is so internet-savvy that he wrote a novel set entirely in Slack), I confessed my taboo desire to outsource all of my “life management” to an AI.
“When you talk about the nonsense of technological debris in your life, I think the question is, ‘Do you need everything you have?’ Isn’t it worth the time to hone your skills if you need to? ” Calvin told me. “I don’t think we should allow those skills to atrophy.”
He makes a good point. Perhaps you can pay more attention when you’re talking to a friend instead of asking Siri to remind you about a TV show your friend said you should watch. You don’t want to get into the habit of forgetting important details of conversations.
“I’m sorry, but all these commercials are like, “What if you asked a computer to buy your child a birthday gift?” “What if you tried to learn what your child likes?” “It’s like…I don’t know, but (they) don’t want to do basic human acts,” he said.
Perhaps when we say we want Siri to be like Emily from The Devil Wears Prada, we should remember that Emily’s character is on the verge of collapse. I know I can’t psychologically affect Siri the way Miranda Priestly damaged Emily, but will I ever become the kind of person who can’t function without a friendly robot voice on my phone? Do I want to be that person?
At least if I decide to opt out of all of this, Apple will let me do that. Unlike Google’s controversial search overhaul, the new AI Siri can be turned on and off, so you don’t have to use it. Until then, you’ll have to decide whether the forbidden fruit of Siri AI is worth your while.
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