Here's What's Changing With Siri in 2025

[GermanSuplex]

Siri really is that bad. I’m an Apple apologist at times, but I’m definitely seeing what other folks are when it comes to Siri - my Firestick Alexa actually surprises me with its accuracy, and that’s only for basic search, something you would have thought Apple would have nailed down by now. But the problem is that it seems to get worse even compared to only previous iterations of Siri, without comparing it to any other voice/AI assistants.

As for the HomePod, I swear it used to surprise me with how it could pick up my voice across the room at a whisper. It’s definitely not as well-working as it used to be.

 

[ApplesAreSweet&Sour]

Siri is shockingly bad sometimes. Especially when asking it to play music. It oddly favors mumble rap and will play mumble rap if the name of the song you ask for is even remotely similar.

Mumble rap songs churned out like Oreos at the Nabisco factory, so Apple Music associating every word in the American dictionary with at least a dozen or so mumble rap songs isn't that surprising.

What's actually terrible is how Siri and Apple Music is so ignorant about you, the user that it keeps suggesting songs, artists and genres that you never listen to, or have told it you don't like.

Siri should have a toggled to give it a bias to play songs, artists and genres that are the same or close to the ones you've played previously and not "start over" with every request and consider any song, artist or genres that just sounds like it matches the words in your request.

 

[Yr Blues]

I don't want some human-like personal assistant sorting all of my porn.

 

[Elohim369]

Siri hasn't improved at all for me either. I wouldn't worry about it, I just expect Siri to always be mostly useless.

Yes - Siri is as dumb and as bad as recognizing my voice as ever! It's crazy!!!!

I can take an open source model - whisper - wire it up with python in less than an hour of work, and have perefect 100% accurate text to speech and speech to text on my laptop!

And Apple can't make it work for Siri? Even though the iPhone has a neural processor on chip? Even though they also have massive server farms they can run this on? Even though they could rent the service from others until they can make it work on their own?

there's just 100 different ways Apple could ship this today.

Yet here we are... 6 months into iOS 18.... 13 months into AI.... and nothing. Apple moves at glacial speed.

Obviously what SIRI needs to be is what other startups have already shipped on specialized devices - a personal assistant.

Some things that are extremely easy to do with open source LLMs as of early 2024:

- Perfect speech recognition regardless of your accent etc - perfect speech to text
- Perfect speech generation - perfect text to speech
- Perfect tech help - don't know how to do something on your iPhone - AI is your best geeky friend, knows everything about your phone, all the million settings, etc
- This tech knowledge could also be used to "just do it" - "Siri, this app keeps spemming me with notifications, pleas make it stop" -> Siri turns off notification for the app.
- Transitioning the entire UX to a mostly speech based user interface - the iPhone should work exactly like the ship computer in Star Trek - just do the things for me. Just by text.

So all this should be in Siri.

But we get AI emoji? WTF Apple?? No one cares about emoji.

Even AI things like writing some text for me - I can do that with ChatGPT and a thousand other apps. Siri should take the iphone to the next level.

 

[Elohim369]

I don't want some human-like personal assistant sorting all of my porn.

Ship computer in Star Trek.

End of story.

 

[Yrmmont]

Will Siri help to delete my daily spam mail? I get 7-9 offers daily. I would rather not see these and hope they can be deleted by AI.

 

[JonYo]

As long as there's an off button for all of this. I don't want any of it.

 

[Tagbert]

Mumble rap songs churned out like Oreos at the Nabisco factory, so Apple Music associating every word in the American dictionary with at least a dozen or so mumble rap songs isn't that surprising.

What's actually terrible is how Siri and Apple Music is so ignorant about you, the user that it keeps suggesting songs, artists and genres that you never listen to, or have told it you don't like.

Siri should have a toggled to give it a bias to play songs, artists and genres that are the same or close to the ones you've played previously and not "start over" with every request and consider any song, artist or genres that just sounds like it matches the words in your request.

It’s pretty clear that the current Siri can only interpret your request and then just submit it to an iTunes search API to get a result. There is no real AI involved in the process. I am hopeful that, once Siri is replaced by a full LLM version, it will be able to consider the full context of your personal preferences and a better index of music and make an actual intelligent match. We are not there, yet.

 

[sir1963nz]

I still use an iPhone 11, see zero reason to change.
There is no "must have" in anything newer

 

[ZipZilla]

Siri is 10 years behind Google in the voice assistant space. Google Assistant on a budget Android phone is better than the most expensive iPhone. Laughably bad

 

[allenvanhellen]

I don’t want to update until this has gone through 4-5 years of bug fixes.

Siri on the iPhone 4S wasn’t so amazing but its implementation didn’t cause any trouble. iOS 5 was practically perfect: only small bugs, very clean, elegant, and efficient.

 

[harvester32]

Me: Siri...send the pics from the party on Friday to my Dad. Me: NOT THOSE PICS SIRI...UNDO! Siri: I'm sorry, I don't understand your request. Would you like to try Chat GPT? Me: Sigh.

 

[StevieD100]

Come on Apple, give us a way to nuke SIRI entirely from our devices. I don't want it listening in by accident. It is not as if I am doing anything illegal but I value my privacy. I see SIRI as just another attack vector for the nasties out there.

 

[martint235]

I just broke up with that crazy beeatch Siri earlier tonight and transferred all my data over to a brand new Pixel 9 pro xl. Gemini even helped out with the contacts transfer and the iCloud batch download/import. So far, so good. Almost 30 years of Apple loyalty from Mac SE thru iMac Pro/minis, almost all iPhones, AirPods out the arse (including the max cost, minimal performing MAX), HomePods in drawers, watches overhyped, etc, etc. I am finally free of the walled technical woke dystopian isolation of Cook’s overpriced fantasyland. Last remaining piece of Apple gear in my possession is this iPad Pro upon which I’m typing and like. Free at last, free at last.

I kept my macs but everything else Apple has gone. Gemini is in a completely different class to Siri.

 

[martint235]

idk about happily, my parents bitch about Alexa to me all the time, and i can’t troubleshoot anything for them because i don’t use it

honestly idk how people are comfortable having Alexa control their whole smart home and stuff (while concurrently showing a bunch of ads on the Echo Show). it’s super creepy. Apple is the only company i’d trust something like that from, especially with there being a camera on there following you around

my family is the “i don’t have anything to hide, so why should i care about privacy” types 🙄

Is this the same Apple that isn't creepy but has just agreed to pay $77m because Siri broke privacy laws by listening when it shouldn't?

 

[DoctorMesmer]

I still use an iPhone 11, see zero reason to change.
There is no "must have" in anything newer

Apart from the camera, I’m inclined to agree.
I recently “upgraded” from an iPhone 11PM to a 15PM. Other than being a bit snappier in everyday use, the only obvious improvement is the camera – which is the reason I bought it. Even then, the camera on my wife’s iPhone 13 Pro, with its wider aperture, often beats my 15PM.

 

[robvalentine]

All I want is for Siri to actually work and toggle stuff without saying you need to download an app for that which would save me from manually opening the already downloaded app and having to manually toggle it

 

[Gadger Snr]

Being dyslexic, I just wish what I speak. It would put down clearly, but never does. That's the only thing I can hope.

 

[JulianL]

One thing is for sure...Siri can't get any more stupid. From "Who's speaking?" several times per week to just plain ignoring my requests...Apple, you do use HomePods with Siri in your homes right? Why do we have to yell at the HomePod in order for it to hear us? Why does my wife's phone start playing music when I ask Siri on my large HomePod to play music? It's such a pathetically bad experience. I'm really surprised Apple allows this. If iPhone worked the same way...sometimes Face ID would work based on whether you were touching the phone with your thumb, or the speaker would cut in and out all the time, or the volume buttons would only work if the screen has the color blue somewhere. Apple, please fix this POS interface! And no, I don't want you to send results to my iPhone in the other room!!!

Yeah. What you’re talking about is so fundamental. I use iPhone and iPad but not HomePods so I rarely use Siri but I am a huge smart speaker fan and have both Google/Nest and Amazon devices in most rooms in my home. Despite Google Assistant being significantly smarter than Amazon Alexa, at least in my experience, I still find myself using my Amazon smart speakers almost all the time because they respond to the wake-up word so much better even in noisy environments without me having to yell, repeat myself etc.

It’s all very well rolling out supposedly cutting edge smart assistants but if those assistants don’t have good front end audio processing that’s an immediate barrier to giving the user a good experience.

I’ll be perfectly happy to switch all my smart speakers to Apple if it is able to surprise everyone and leapfrog all its competitors at some point but for now I don’t find any of the smart speaker options out there entirely satisfactory and have just settled (for now) on Amazon/Alexa as the best of a somewhat disappointing lot.

 

[djgamble]

Honestly the only feature I want is for Siri to be less of an idiot. Examples...

- When asking Siri for directions to a popular town centre in my mum's city it kept yakking on about 'Karen's Diner'. I told Siri to stop and she stopped the music instead of navigating. Stop navigating... nothing! I then lost it at her and instead of being like 'I am doing something wrong and my owner is pissed off, maybe I should try harder' it started lecturing me about being courteous. I'm like... this is so bad it's not funny!!!

- When I ask for Siri to play popular kids' music on Apple Music (for my kids in the car) it often ends up playing rap with explicit lyrics (and zero similarity between the titles). I hate rap and it's completely inappropriate to have some creepo babbling on about a heap of sexual references. It will then do it AGAIN and AGAIN without being like 'maybe this is a false match that I should abandon? Noting... I KNOW this guy's playlist and he's not into rap so it's a weird request!!!'

- I'm in Japan a lot and am a fluent Japanese speaker. Siri is largely unusable as it tries (very poorly I might add) to say (AND INTERPRET!!!) all the place names in English. I swear it just makes up syllables that aren't even there. Surely SOMEBODY at Apple has tested this and been like 'for place names in maps we should use the Japanese voice + pronunciation'. I just end up using the ghetto built-in GPS instead as its basic voice recognition (which can understand my Japanese pronunciation with close to 100% accuracy despite being a dodgy, bolt-on feature in a cheapo car) works better.

 

[PsykX]

Since the new Siri is tied to Apple Intelligence, will Siri have that functionality on devices with less than 8 gb of RAM?

The most important game-changing feature is LLM. This is foundational.
Yes this will require a lot of power - at least 8GB for sure.

Until then, Siri will remain really bad no matter what bells and whistles they add to it.

 

[PsykX]

Honestly the only feature I want is for Siri to be less of an idiot.

This requires Siri to be based on a LLM. It'll be part of iOS 19 though. A couple more months to wait.

 

[zoozx]

Siri is Sh.

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

idk about happily, my parents bitch about Alexa to me all the time, and i can’t troubleshoot anything for them because i don’t use it

Try remedy-ing that one with Siri and see how it goes. Even many Apple fans who can seem to only see about anything & everything Apple as 'practically perfect in every way' will acknowledge in some way that Alexa seems 'smarter' than Siri. Hopefully that changes soon... but that's been an enduring hope since about the year AFTER Jobs rolled out Siri. We're still waiting for tangible steps forward while watching these other 'siris' who were born later seem to be next or next-next steps in the evolution of the species.

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

I don’t understand this take at all. I have Amazon devices and they are garbage. I prefer Apple Maps far more than Google maps and Apple Music still has a poor UI, but the competition is not much better (Beats was awesome before Apple bought them).

Prefer and which is best can be 2 different things. I too prefer Apple Maps. It's much more attractive, etc. But when I really need to get to the right place, Google Maps tends to win on location accuracy. Apple Maps will beautifully lead me to the wrong destination but Google mostly gets me to the right place.

Competition- specifically Spotify- vs. Apple Music delivers "smarter" guesses at what users want to hear. I think towards all of us know it's better at that but some of us deny it because we need the favorite brand to win in all such contests. I think Apple could can water and some would claim that it is the superior water to all waters.

So to "understand this take" focus on the main purpose of a Map or the main use of a Music streamer, regardless of brand. I think that is to get a traveler to the correct destination as often as possible (Google for the win with better data) or play music the listener will like vs. skewing- it seems- to the hip hop genre a bit more than anything else. If we want to filter something through lenses that most favor Apple's version, Apple's version will win. For example, which voice assistant is best at pointing people to the web for whatever they ask of it? Siri is clearly the far & away winner at that. No assistant dos that better.