More Advanced AI Siri Functionality Not Coming to iOS 18 Until 2025

[NT1440]

I wonder where they're gonna source all those gigawatts for the LLM cloud. Solar, Wind, Nuclear.... Coal? The LLM revolution is dramatically increasing the energy demands of large providers and shattering climate goals. Let's see if Apple really cares as much about the planet as they say.

There’s a reason why (comparatively) power sipping M2 Ultra chip orders are ramping up. Apple’s AI Data centers are going to consume a ton of power…but far and away less then those housing the monstrous server power requirements of the rest of the industry.

 

[T0mmyR0t]

What party was that? What did they blow away?

2010. The iPad. I'm guessing you've heard of it.

Or earlier.

2007. The iPhone. I'm guessing you've heard of this, too.

 

[T0mmyR0t]

At first i was glad that Apple implements an own - maybe more innovative - AI with Siri (Pro?) and doesn't buy an AI service like ChatGPT.
Now they aren't able to release anything until 2025? Did they sleep under a rock, was there nothing in development?
I don't want to use normal Siri anymore, it's painful (in comparison).

F*k it, i enable ChatGPT with Shortcuts and when i say "Hey Siri Pro" then ChatGPT pops up instead of Siri.

I do that, too. OpenAI charges for queries are very nominal. With Apple's bargaining power, they'll be able to negotiate an extremely cheap per-query cost with OpenAI. But we all know how Cook operates. Can you imagine the premium Apple are going to charge to make these OpenAI queries via Siri?

 

[ninecows]

2010. The iPad. I'm guessing you've heard of it.

Or earlier.

2007. The iPhone. I'm guessing you've heard of this, too.

iPhone: Blown away for sure. Totally disruption in of the market.

iPad a bit less.

 

[acader]

And by that time Artificial Intelligence would have matured into Real Intelligence!!

 

[Daniel908]

I wonder if some Intel-based Macs will get macOS 15 at this point. I hope they will receive it and be able to run at least AI features via the cloud.

 

[Jkeith85]

Average user, outside some picture and video editing, isn’t going to care, at all.

 

[ninecows]

Luckily for me I am already intelligent, so I really don’t need it. But I am happy on your behalf that they’re going to improve it

 

[madeirabhoy]

The AI Agent feature I've been commenting about:



A scenario:

User:
Siri, I'd like to have dinner with my girlfriend tonight at that place I walked by last week with the red umbrella. I took a photo of it.

Siri:

Looks at your Photos (offline), finds the red umbrella, geotagged,
locates the restaurant in Apple Maps (online),
brings up OpenTable (online) cues up a reservation after looking at your Calendar (offline).

That was Sandro's on College St. I've found you a reservation for 2 at 8pm. You get off work at 5, that should give you enough time to get home, get ready and head over to Sandro's. Ana's schedule also shows her free. Would you like me to book it?

User:
Yes... no, wait, can we do 8:30 instead? I'd like to get a bottle of wine, does Sandro's have a corking fee?

Siri:

Looks up OpenTable (online) to see if there's an 8:30pm reservation.
Looks up Sandro's website (online) and searches for a corking fee.
Looks up Apple Maps for nearby wine stores,
finds one that's on the Ritual app (online) so they can can bag your wine for pickup,
finds that you've ordered 2 different wines via Ritual.

Sandro's has a $6 corking fee. I found you an 8:30 reservation. Would you like Mateus Rose or Wolf Blass - Yellow Label Sauvignon? I can reserve it at the Wine Cellar, a short walk from Sandro's.

User:
Let's do Mateus. Go ahead and book the reservation please.

Siri:

Goes to OpenTable, places the reservation on your behalf.
Goes to Ritual, orders a bottle of Mateus Rose for pickup at 8pm.
Adds an event in your calendar with directions to the Wine Cellar
and another at 8:30pm with directions from there to Sandro's.
Creates a calendar invite for your girlfriend.

All set! Your Mateus Rose will be ready for pickup at 8pm, Sandro's at 8:30 on College St. and I've sent an invite to Ana.

---

Apple's advantage in AI is the App Store, far larger than any other platform. If Siri can operate those apps for you (and their published papers show us that's where they're headed) then it'll be far more capable than anything openAI has done.

that sounds so Siri and so apple, to sound like it has intelligence then suggests someone is going to pay corkage to be able to take a bottle of Mateus rose into a restaurant.

 

[Biro]

iPhone: Blown away for sure. Totally disruption in of the market.

iPad a bit less.

Oh, I’m not sure about that. The iPad launched the entire post-PC market.

 

[kevcube]

I don't even want to do this kinda crap. I just want Siri to be able to quickly do basic math:

View attachment 2383700

Or be able to answer simple questions about the most popular sports league in the US, the NFL:

View attachment 2383701

It has gotten dumber over the years. Sometimes it just straight up gives me the wrong answer to a math question. Like here, it clearly received the decimal point in the query, shown at the bottom, but the result, shown above, is WAY off because it decided to remove the decimal for no good reason.

View attachment 2383702

And don't even get me started on how many times it forgets what my lights are called in my house and gaslights me about how there is nothing with that name in HomeKit. Then I try again a moment later and it works fine!

View attachment 2383703

Or that you can't even ask it basic questions, like what is the speed of light...because it gets confused.

View attachment 2383704

Apple, just fix Siri before you go gumming it up with all of this BS!!

My ****ing favorite was I asked “when’s the full moon?” And she told me “roughly once per month”

 

[ipedro]

Siri can barely turn on my lights so this will certainly be welcome.

Not holding my breath but if Siri has indeed bern overhauled, I’m fine waiting.

As always, don’t rush it Apple, quality matters. But keep in mind you’re already running late.

Honestly, believe it or not, this is not a huge leap from what we know already exists, what LLM's can do combined with research that Apple has published. An AI Agent, one that understands Apple's own APIs and how developers implement functions in apps approved for the App Store, should be able to understand how to use apps just as we do. Apple's big advantage is that it already has millions of apps that can work with this on day one.

 

[ipedro]

This is SO FAR from anything Siri can do, I would just like it to not completely suck. It feels like incremental improvements have slowed or stopped for it for years.

Siri is being completely rebuilt from the ground up. They've long given up trying to improve Siri on the old platform. We've all felt that. It just wasn't scalable. An LLM approach will be completely different than the Siri we know because LLM's are infinitely scalable by design. The more it knows, the better it gets.

 

[ipedro]

that sounds so Siri and so apple, to sound like it has intelligence then suggests someone is going to pay corkage to be able to take a bottle of Mateus rose into a restaurant.

Not sure where you are, but a corkage fee is fairly common in many parts of the world. You can't just bring your own bottle off the street, sit in a restaurant and not pay anything if you're not eating or eating very little. Little of what you pay in a restaurant is what you consume; you pay for the experience of sitting in that restaurant.

 

[glindon]

What they should do is have the UI elements of any arbitrary app be recognized by AI and controllable by commands given to AI. That way you could operate anything and everything by spoken commands, and also could script UI workflows involving arbitrary apps.

They should already be able to easily do this as they already have accessibility that can read and highlight app buttons. One would think it would be trivial to catalog what buttons do what and map it to a voice command, then recursively take a string of commands and map them back to the buttons as though the user is actually pressing them. Also they have shortcuts which tie into apps. But I’m sure we’ll get some nice and shiny emoji at least as consolation prizes. Thanks Apple for nothing.

 

[Tagbert]

They should already be able to easily do this as they already have accessibility that can read and highlight app buttons. One would think it would be trivial to catalog what buttons do what and map it to a voice command, then recursively take a string of commands and map them back to the buttons as though the user is actually pressing them. Also they have shortcuts which tie into apps. But I’m sure we’ll get some nice and shiny emoji at least as consolation prizes. Thanks Apple for nothing.

That is the reason they have built Ferret-UI. It is an LLM that can see the UI of an arbitrary app, figure out the functions, and then automate interactions with it.

Emoji are easy and mostly done by designers not developers.

Apple teaching an AI system to use apps; maybe for advanced Siri

An Apple research paper describes how the company has been developing Ferret-UI, a generative AI system specifically designed to be...

9to5mac.com

 

[StyxMaker]

My ****ing favorite was I asked “when’s the full moon?” And she told me “roughly once per month”

She could, at least, add “except for months with a blue moon.

 

[Macaholic868]

AI …. Coming to iOS is 2030 … we promise!!!!

 

[Ghengis LeMond]

why? people are still going to buy the next iPhone, they aren't going to switch to Android, they're locked into the apple ecosystem. just do some stock buybacks, easy work.

imac - gone (replaced 10/23 w/ an i913900k, 32” 4k ips and a 4090 W 5 TB of flash and 64 GB ram. Saved $2500 over similar configured studio. It still blows me away every day)
m2 MBP - work machine, refresh in aug. Probably will go with an engineering win/linux laptop for software availability and compatibility.
Apple Watch - gone (galaxy watch 6. Saved hundreds & better watch imho)
iPhone 13 - up next month (will replace w/ OnePlus 12, S24 or may wait on new releases in fall. Will save $$$ on an arguably better, but certainly more open phone)
air pods max - possibly the worst fing audio purchase I’ve ever made.
‘this m1 iPad Pro? It’ll stick around awhile, don’t really need a tablet anyway
HomePod - I think it’s in a drawer somewhere. haven’t thought about it in a while
apple TV? - probably in same drawer as HomePod. No idea. (Have you seen the newer android side loaded boxes out there?????)

my days in the ecosystem and ‘lock in’ are OVER. Much better for my wallet, my productivity and general sense of technology satisfaction and love of innovation. I’m keeping an eye on Apple - I think the shorts are not too far off in the future. I do hope apple finds their way again but the robbery, lack of innovation and nonsensical hype of Tim Cook and the vacuum of leadership has to go first.

 

[genovelle]

Yeah, I would prefer them to just launch the new Siri when it’s 100% ready, even if that means putting it off until iOS 19.

However, I think I know why they prefer to announce it during WWDC now and deliver it next year; in line of what @antiprotest said, they are a bit late to the party, and if they delay it until iOS 19, all the (AI) competition will be at least a year and a half ahead of them.

So it kinda makes sense to announce and show off the new AI capabilities and Siri 2.0 at WWDC and keep working hard to deliver a great experience as soon as possible, be it with iOS 18.3 or 18.4

I think it’s because these kinds of integration requires updates to apps, by developers and to be able to test it a scale before officially releasing it.

 

[genovelle]

No it's terrible. Throw some group theory at it.

If H is a group and G is a subgroup of H and A is a subgroup of G and H then what is F?

Eventually it makes some assumption that A = F after rambling on about possible interpretations of what F is.

It has no idea what the hell it's on about and the output is misleading and incorrect but sounds authoritative. It literally makes less sense than me after a few piña coladas.

Also you can throw some fun at it:

View attachment 2383719

It doesn't understand the difference between kelvin and Celsius and if you feed it a bad prompt, it'll just carry on rather than tell you that you're an idiot.

0K = -273.15oC

Honestly I don’t trust ChatGTP and Co-Pilot+ is worse. I use it a lot to keep from jumping from page to page for information, but it makes a lot of mistakes especially with calculations. It also, has a political bias, that it believes is avoiding bias. If you ask certain questions about Trump for instance it will do everything in its power not to answer. If you mention Hamas to try to get context for what’s happening there it will often announce it a terrorist organization and never answer the question.

 

[Populus]

I think it’s because these kinds of integration requires updates to apps, by developers and to be able to test it a scale before officially releasing it.

Well thought! I didn’t think of it. And yes, I agree, if the AI implementation is not only at the operating system level but it also offers APIs (AIKit?) for developers to take advantage of such capabilities -which could be a huge shift in how we use them-, then it has sense to give devs 6-8 months to adapt their apps if they want to use such APIs.

 

[Sandovalg2]

Groundbreaking! We are going from “Siri, set up timer” to “Siri, take a picture”
I can’t wait!

 

[DeepIn2U]

This is SO FAR from anything Siri can do, I would just like it to not completely suck. It feels like incremental improvements have slowed or stopped for it for years.

"I got an iphone i love it so much it even helped me get a girlfriend" = anyone remember that stupid add promp featured in the WWDC.? LMAO pure jokes, but simply sad.

 

[DeepIn2U]

At first i was glad that Apple implements an own - maybe more innovative - AI with Siri (Pro?) and doesn't buy an AI service like ChatGPT.
Now they aren't able to release anything until 2025? Did they sleep under a rock, was there nothing in development?
I don't want to use normal Siri anymore, it's painful (in comparison).

F*k it, i enable ChatGPT with Shortcuts and when i say "Hey Siri Pro" then ChatGPT pops up instead of Siri.

Don't worry that'll break soon enough - as I've experienced late last summer before leaving iOS for good. The next significant update will ensure you of that.