Apple got into the smartphone game at the right time with a lot of new ideas. But whatever the next big shift in technology is, they will be left behind. I don’t know if that is AI, but it’s clear that in AI they are already far behind other companies.

While driving past a restaurant, I wanted to know if they were open for lunch and if they had gluten-free items on their menu.

I asked the "new" Siri to check this for me while driving, so I gave it a shot.

"I did some web searches for you but I can't read it out to you while driving."

Then what on earth is its purpose if not that!? THAT! That is what it's for! It's meant to be a voice assistant, not a laptop with a web browser!

I checked while stopped, and it literally just googled "restaurant gluten free menu" and... that's it. Nothing specific about my location. That's nuts.

Think about what data and access the phone has:

1. It knows I'm driving -- it is literally plugged into the car's Apple CarPlay port.

2. It knows where I am because it is doing the navigating.

3. It can look at the map and see the restaurant and access its metadata such as its online menu.

4. Any modern LLM can read the text of the web page and summarize it given a prompt like "does this have GF items?"

5. Text-to-voice has been a thing for a decade now.

How hard can this be? Siri seems to have 10x more developer effort sunk into refusing to do the things it can already do instead of... I don't know... just doing the thing.

What users actually experience is this: every other major platform is shipping increasingly capable intelligent assistants. These systems can interpret intent, execute multi-step actions, and meaningfully reduce friction. Meanwhile, Siri still struggles with fairly basic workflows.

At the end of the day, I do not particularly care about internal constraints, organizational structure, privacy positioning, or strategic rationale. What matters is whether the product works.

Today, I still cannot reliably:

- Dictate complex voice input without constant correction

- Use voice to control my iPhone in a composable way such as “open this contact and send a message,” “replay the song I liked yesterday,” or “create a note in Obsidian with this content: …”

- Chain actions together in a way that reflects actual user intent

These are not futuristic requests. They are practical, everyday workflows that competitors are increasingly able to handle.

The gap is no longer about incremental feature parity. It is about whether Apple can deliver a genuinely intelligent interface layer, or whether Siri remains a deterministic command parser in an era where users expect contextual reasoning.

What does surprise me is that Google Home is still so bad. They rolled out the new Gemini-based version, but if anything it's even worse than the old one. Same capabilities but more long-winded talking about them. It is still unable to answer basic questions like "what timer did you just cancel".

But I wonder how much of the problem is due to trying to minimise data processing off-device. Even with Open AI as a last resort, I don't imagine you get much value choosing betwixt the local model or a private cloud that doesn't save context.

Meanwhile the average user is yeeting their PII into Altman's maw without much thought so Siri is always going to seem rubbish by comparison.

Is this really a reason to delay though? It's not like the current Siri is capable of processing queries outside of "set a timer"

Or are these challenges very Siri/iOS specific?

I mean, for anyone familiar with LLMs this is not exactly a surprise. There is no way Apple can remove the inherent downsides of this technology regardless of how enthusiastic the ai bros are about it.

In a twisted way, I’m happy there are at least some teams at Apple where it doesn’t get a pass for bugs just because it has AI on the sticker

They are late with a release, they must have unlearned to build software.

There's a lot of AI features that makes sense for Apple to include and develop, a voice assistant isn't one of them. If they want to turn Siri into an Apple ChatGPT, then that's slightly different, and more about getting yet another product that would make users sign up for a monthly iCloud subscription. If it's all on device though, that doesn't really seem like the goal.