Apple has been on its back foot, AI-wise, for the past few years. But in a strange way, playing from behind might not be such a bad move.
At WWDC on Monday, Apple appears to be getting ready to reintroduce us to the new Siri. Again. As a reminder, we met the new Siri in 2024 when Apple “launched” Apple Intelligence. Siri came with a new glowing border, different voice options, and the ability to punt questions to ChatGPT. The whole “Intelligence” bit of the Siri redesign was coming soon, Apple promised. It didn’t. In fact, its promotion around Apple Intelligence was so misleading that the company is settling a class-action lawsuit and has to pay iPhone owners for the features it never shipped. The funny thing is, by fumbling the ball so badly, Apple might have just fallen backward into an advantageous position.
Let’s be clear; if such a thing as a race to an AI assistant exists, Apple is losing badly. Gemini is already doing things like ordering Ubers and DoorDashing teriyaki. It can look at your calendar and figure out when you should leave for the airport. Gemini won the race, fair and square.
Gemini is already doing things like ordering Ubers and DoorDashing teriyaki
But there’s also a growing distrust of AI, particularly from young people, and the better Gemini gets, the creepier it is. It has to be if it’s going to deliver on the promise of a truly helpful assistant. But wanting your AI assistant to anticipate your next move and actually watching it happen? Those are very different things. I willingly gave Gemini permission to access my Google Photos and Gmail, but it always makes my skin crawl hearing Gemini say my son’s name out loud. I test out a lot of this stuff as it becomes available — hazard of the job — but the public reaction when these kinds of features start trickling down to the mainstream will be very telling.
New New Siri will be built on top of Gemini in some fashion. Apple is no doubt paying handsomely for the privilege, but there’s a potential upside to being one step removed in this way. You know what company doesn’t have its name attached to a big, unpopular data center project? Apple. Google isn’t winning friends and influencing people by rushing to start massive construction projects in backyards across the country. Apple gets to keep its hands clean, even if its payments to Google are presumably being funneled toward the great data center buildout.
Then there’s the Copilot of it all; the AI-buttons-everywhere factor. Siri’s attempts to summarize messages are amusing and often annoying, but at least Siri isn’t all up in every one of my work documents begging to summarize it for me. On the other hand, you can’t open a Google app without coming face-to-face with a Gemini sparkle these days, and it risks getting real old, real fast.
Don’t get me wrong; I think Apple would love to put Siri to work writing my emails, perfecting my photos into “memories,” and talking me through the next steps to rehabilitate the dying plants in my yard. It’s just that Siri can’t really do any of that yet. When we meet this new Gemini-enhanced Siri, it’ll be telling to see where and how aggressively it surfaces. According to Bloomberg’s reporting, it sure sounds like we’re going to see it in a lot of places: the Dynamic Island, Photos, maybe even its own dedicated Siri app for the first time. That’s a very different Siri from the timer-setting voice assistant we currently know, mostly hiding behind the scenes.
I suspect Apple is also going to play up the thing it already loves playing up: privacy. You can bet we’ll hear more about Private Cloud Compute, which supposedly keeps your data as secure as if it had never left your device. The updated Siri may also come with the option to automatically delete chats after a certain period of time, rather than holding onto that data by default. Promising a more private, secure AI experience might appeal to people who are squeamish about handing over even more personal info to Google. But it doesn’t do much for someone who’s just sick of having AI in their face all day in every piece of software.
An advantage, especially the kind you stumble on, can disappear as quickly as it arrived.
Apple could easily cast its slow AI rollout as the more responsible move. Google execs used to constantly talk about being “bold and responsible” with AI, but lately they’re too busy firing off new Gemini features and basking in the foothills of the singularity to dwell on that much. Passing off the delays as taking the time to do things right isn’t a bad bet, but the time for false starts is over. Siri’s going to have to pull it off for real this time; when a second chance like this comes around, you can’t count on it coming back.