Apple’s AI-powered Siri could render other AI devices (even more) useless

So far, AI devices like the Rabbit R1 and the Humane Ai pin have been all hype, not substance. The gadgets have largely failed to live up to their promise as true AI companions, but even if they didn’t suffer from constant bugs resulting from a rush-to-market strategy, they still suffer from a fundamental flaw: Why do I need a separate AI device when I can do basically anything , what is advertised via smartphone?

That’s a tough sell, and that’s why I’m quite skeptical about AI hardware taking off in any meaningful way. I imagine anyone interested in artificial intelligence would be more likely to download the ChatGPT app and ask it about the world around them than spend hundreds of dollars on a standalone device. However, if you have an iPhone, you may soon forget about the AI ​​app entirely.

Siri could be the promised AI assistant

While Apple is completely late to the AI ​​adoption, it may be working on something that will actually succeed where Rabbit and Humane failed: according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple plans to big Siri update in newer iOS 18: While rumors have previously suggested that Apple is working on making interactions with Siri more natural, the latest leaks suggest that the company is giving Siri the ability to control “hundreds” of features in Apple’s apps: You say what you want the assistant to do ( e.g. cropped this photo) and this will happen. If true, it’s a huge step forward from using Siri to set alarms and check the weather.

Gurman says Apple had to essentially reprogram Siri for this feature, integrating the assistant with LLM for all its AI processing. He says Apple plans to make Siri the main showpiece at WWDC, demonstrating how the new AI assistant can open documents, move notes to specific folders, manage email and create a summary of an article you’re reading. At this point, Siri’s AI reportedly supports one command at a time, but Apple wants to roll out an update that will also allow for command stacking. Theoretically, you could end up asking Siri to perform multiple functions within apps. Apple also plans to start with its own apps, so Siri won’t be able to communicate this way on Instagram or YouTube – at least for now.

It won’t be ready for a while, either: While iOS 18 will likely arrive in the fall, Gurman thinks AI Siri will hit the market at least sooner than next year. Apart from that, we don’t know anything else about this change yet. But the idea that you can ask Siri to do anything on your smartphone is intriguing: in Messages, you can say “Hey Siri, react to David’s last message with your heart.” In Notes, you can say, “Hey Siri, invite Sarah and Michael to collaborate on this note.” If Apple finds a way to make virtually every iOS feature Siri-friendly, it could be a game-changer.

In fact, it could turn Siri (and, to a greater extent, your iPhone) into the AI ​​assistants that companies are trying to sell to the public. Imagine a future where you can point your iPhone at a topic and ask Siri to tell you more about it. You can then ask Siri to take a photo of the topic, crop it, and email it to a friend along with a summary of what you just learned about. Perhaps you’re scrolling through a complicated article and asking Siri to summarize it. With this perfect AI version of Siri, you don’t need a Rabbit R1 or a Humane Ai Pin: you just need Apple’s latest and greatest iPhone. Not only will Siri do everything these AI devices say, but it will also do everything else you usually do on your iPhone. Win-win.

The iPhone, however, is the other side of the coin: these features consume a lot of power, so the rumor is that Apple is rethinking which features can run on the device and which need to run in the cloud. The more functions Apple outsources to the cloud, the greater the security risk, although some rumors say the company is working to make even cloud-based AI functions secure. However, Apple will likely leave the AI-powered Siri features on its device, which means you may need at least an iPhone 15 Pro to run them.

The truth is that we won’t know exactly what AI features Apple has planned until they hit the scene in June. However, if Gurman’s sources are to be believed, Apple’s delayed AI strategy might just work to its advantage.