NY Times report says Siri's new AI future will begin at WWDC

The tech gods are finally smiling at Siri if a report published in the New York Times (via 9to5Mac) today is true. We've been writing a few times about our personal feelings about Siri's shortcomings and the hope that Apple's AI initiatives will allow the virtual digital assistant to respond to more queries with one direct answer instead of tossing three excerpts from different websites at us forcing us to find what might be the correct answer among them.

There is nothing more frustrating than asking Siri a question about the iPhone only to hear the ol' gal say those six discouraging words: "I found this on the web." Even more frustrating is when Siri gives you three websites to peruse and Google Assistant gives you the answer immediately and clearly without you having to go read three excerpts from three different websites.

For example, I asked Siri to tell me the resolution of the screen used on the original iPhone. Siri apparently does not care about her ancestry since she disseminated three brief excerpts from three websites so I could dig through them to find the answer. Ask Google Assistant the same question and the response says, "The iPhone's screen is a 320 x 480 resolution LCD screen at 163 ppi that measures about 3.5 inches diagonally, much bigger than most other phones at the time, and the iPhone was the first mobile phone with multi-touch technology." That is a perfect response.

The report in the New York Times says that the revamped Siri will be introduced on June 10th during the WWDC keynote. At that time, Apple will announce that Siri will use generative AI allowing the digital assistant to not only be more conversational, but also helping Siri understand different requests. One part of the report that gives us concern says that Apple is hoping to use the AI additions to improve Siri's ability to set timers, creating reminders, and other such similar tasks. Frankly, we don't believe that Siri needs any help handling those things.

The report notes that Apple decided to give Siri "a brain transplant" early last year after executives Craig Federighi and John Giannandrea played around with ChatGPT. After messing around with the chatbot, the Apple executives decided that Siri needed an overhaul.

So it all comes down to June 10th when we get our first look at what Apple has in mind to improve iOS, iPadOS, and MacOS using AI. Besides Siri, Apple is expected to work some AI magic on apps like Siri, Safari, Spotlight Search, Messages, and Mail.