What If Siri … Just Worked? ⭐

The other day, I was working on a laptop, typing, with no one else in the house and no audio or video playing, when Siri started speaking through my iPhone, startling me a bit. "I'm not sure which Bill you're referring to," it said, confusing me.

This is the Siri that Apple users know all too well and, I assume, often disable. The Siri that is pointless and unhelpful and deliriously out of touch when asked even the simplest questions. The Siri that pops up every time I say "seriously" out loud, which I do frequently. The Siri that complains that she will not listen to that kind of talk when I complain to it that I never asked for it in the first place.

This is not a healthy relationship. It's been like that, controversially, for years, but the issues reached a frantic apex in June 2024, when Apple promised a massive overhaul to its dimwitted digital assistant. Through this year, Siri has endured a years-long Flowers for Algernon experience while rivals like Gemini surged forward. Apple's 2024 announcements were vaporware and lies, and the subsequent marketing of features that never arrived resulted in the company settling a class-action lawsuit. But Apple's ongoing mishaps with Siri finally sent it running back to the more capable arms of Google in their second high-profile and high-stakes partnership, one that would use Gemini on the backend to deliver the first truly useful Siri since the original in 2011.

Given the history, it's far too easy to be dismissive of anything Siri or Siri adjacent, a reaction the Microsoft community is all-too-familiar with thanks to Copilot. But the past two years passed slowly for anyone who was waiting for Apple to pull a rabbit out of the hat, so to speak. In early June, Apple finally revealed its new plans for Siri, which include a standalone chatbot-style app the company's leadership originally claimed was unnecessary, deeper integration into Apple's apps and services, and a unique new Dynamic Island-based pop-up experience on iPhones, among other changes. It's like 2024 never happened. And 2025.

The new Siri and related Apple Intelligence updates will come to Apple's ecosystem via '27 software updates like iOS 27 and iPadOS 27. But developers could get started immediately on early beta versions of these platforms, and as I write this, there have been second and now third developer beta releases ahead of an expected public beta sometime this month. I am registered with the Apple Developer program, so I immediately enrolled all my eligible devices in these betas. And though there was a waitlist for the new Siri, I got in immediately.

It's not bad.

Actually, it's better than that.

The iPhone interfaces are perhaps the most interesting, in part because it's the device Apple users interact with the most and in part because the use of the Dynamic Island is unique to that device. When I say "Hey, Siri" (or just "Siri"), my iPhone issues a soft chime and the Dynamic Island appears to expand...