Apple’s AI-enhanced Siri could make other AI devices even more useless

Apple’s AI-powered Siri could make other AI devices even more useless

So far, AI devices, including the Rabbit R1 and Humane Ai pin, have mostly been advertised without content. These gadgets failed to deliver on their promise of being true AI companions, even if they didn’t suffer from consistent glitches resulting from a rushed market launch. The fundamental problem is: why do I need a separate AI device when I can do everything it advertises with my smartphone?

It’s a hard sell and that’s why I’ve become quite skeptical that AI hardware will have any significant impact. If you’re interested in artificial intelligence, you’re probably more likely to download the ChatGPT app and ask it about the world around you than to spend hundreds of dollars on a standalone device. However, if you have an iPhone, you may soon forget about AI apps entirely.

Can Siri be the AI ​​assistant we’ve always wanted?

Although Apple is a very late adopter of AI, it could succeed where Rabbit and Humane failed: According to a recent report by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple is planning a significant update to Siri in a future version of iOS 18. Although previous rumors have suggested that Apple is working on making interaction with Siri more natural, recent rumors suggest the company will enable Siri to control “hundreds” of features in Apple apps. If true, it would be a big 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 to handle all the AI ​​processing. He says Apple plans to make Siri a prominent feature at this year’s WWDC conference, showing how the improved AI assistant can open documents, move notes to specific folders, manage email and generate a summary of an article you’re reading. Initially, Siri’s AI can handle one command at a time, but Apple wants to release an update that will also allow commands to be stacked. Theoretically, you can ask Siri to perform many functions in apps. Apple will likely start with its own apps, so Siri won’t be able to communicate this way on Instagram or YouTube – at least not yet.

There are no details yet on when Siri AI will be available, as iOS 18 is expected to be released in the fall, but Gurman believes the AI ​​update won’t arrive until next year. However, the idea of ​​being able to ask Siri to do anything on your smartphone is intriguing: you can say “Hey Siri, react with a heart to David’s last message” in Messages, or “Hey Siri, invite Sarah and Michael to collaborate on this note” in Notes. If Apple finds a way to make virtually every iOS feature Siri-friendly, it could be a game-changer.

In fact, it could potentially turn Siri (and, to a greater extent, your iPhone) into an AI assistant that companies have a hard time selling to humans. 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. You can even scroll through a complex article and ask Siri to summarize it. For this perfect AI version of Siri, you don’t need a Rabbit R1 or Humane Ai Pin – just Apple’s latest and greatest iPhone.

But there’s a catch: these features require a lot of power, so Apple is reportedly working on which ones can run on the device and which ones require cloud processing. The more functions that are pushed to the cloud, the greater the security risk. However, rumors circulating suggest that Apple is also working to make its cloud-based AI features equally secure. However, it’s unclear whether Apple will continue to use Siri’s AI-powered features on-device or in the cloud, which means you may need at least an iPhone 15 Pro to run the updated version.

We won’t know details about the AI ​​features Apple is developing until they are revealed at an event in June. However, Gurman’s sources indicate that Apple’s strategy of taking its time might just pay off. 💼

Read also: