I think it’s fair to say Apple’s first few forays into the world of AI and LLMs have been far from smooth. The first iPhone marketed as “designed for Apple Intelligence” was the iPhone 16, released in September 2024. Quite a lot of the features demoed in that year’s WWDC were incomplete, and wouldn’t ship for more than two years. We got some basic AI image generation apps, and some of the typical AI writing tools. I remember trying it out, then turning it all back off again as it didn’t really do anything I wanted or needed.
In fact the experience was so far away from what was promised (and heavily marketed) that Apple was hit with a class action lawsuit which they settled for $250m rather than admit any wrongdoing.
This year Apple are again pushing Apple Intelligence, with an all new version of Siri, dubbed “Siri AI”, which claims to finally deliver some of the features they had spoken about back in 2024. Frustratingly, you need at least an iPhone 17 Pro to get the full experience, as older phones get a more limited version without the new expressive voices or improved dictation. That must really sting if you had bought one of the earlier models advertised as being “designed for Apple Intelligence” only to find out that it lacked the 12GB of RAM that Siri AI apparently requires.
With the release of iOS27, Siri AI is now available in “beta” by joining a waitlist, so I decided to see what all the fuss was about.
Once I’d been accepted for the waitlist, the device performed a lot of “optimisation” to get Spotlight and Siri AI ready, you can see the status of this in the Settings app, it took quite a while to complete, I actually left it running for a couple of days.
The UI changes
Immediately you can see the changes to the UI. In the older version of Siri you’d either get the colourful waveform at the bottom of the screen, or there’d be a rainbow-effect around the edge of the screen. Now you get an inky-black orb that grows from the Dynamic Island at the top. It looks kinda cool, but I do miss the colour of the previous version. On the Mac it looks more out of place, because there’s no Dynamic Island on Mac for it to grow from, it just appears like Spotlight, but as a recessed black pill. I think I prefer the way old Spotlight looked.
The writing tools are unwanted for me, so I can’t really comment on them, but they pop up everywhere, like in context menus and app tooltips. It’s frustrating that there isn’t a single setting to turn them off completely, so I had to keep searching for the option to disable them when they showed up unexpectedly. I wish there was a single place to toggle all of this stuff on and off.
The summarisation feature I continue to find utterly pointless. It was enabled by default for Mail and Notifications, but in nearly every case the summary text ends up being as long (if not longer) as the original text. It can also make changes that alter the meaning in subtle ways. I’d rather just read the real message directly, I don’t really understand why anyone would want to use this feature, especially in the way Apple advertises it – to handle communicating with your friends and loved ones. Why would I want to outsource those interactions to an AI?
The good
In a previous blog post I talked about how Smart Assistants were actually not so smart, particularly when it came to Siri which was often as dumb as a pile of bricks. Siri AI is a lot better, it’s conversational, it remembers context, and it’s aware of the content of the screen so you can refer to things you can see. In summary it’s everything you’d expect an LLM to be able to do these days. You can chain things together, and overall it feels more like asking a person to do tasks for you, rather than a voice interface on top of rigid computer syntax.
For example I often ask Siri to add items to a shopping list, for when I next go to the supermarket. Previously if I asked it to add two items to the list, they’d often end up in a single list item. Siri AI fixes that, but I was also able to ask it to “split this item into multiple items on the shopping list” and it understood what I meant, and did the correct thing. That’s already a big improvement compared to the basic Siri.
The bad
Apple has decided that Siri AI should replace the Spotlight interface on both iPhone and Mac, rather than keep them both available. The problem I noticed immediately is it feels much slower than the previous version. For example on iPhone without Siri AI I would routinely pull down on the home screen, type a few letters of an app name, then tap on the app icon that appeared to launch it. This is consistently quick and predictable.
Siri AI is much slower, presumably because now the text is being interpreted through an LLM first. I also noticed this delay on things like setting timers, which I do a lot when cooking – previously these requests would be performed immediately, now it seems to take several seconds while the LLM processes it.
On the Mac, I noticed the same thing – tasks which were essentially instant before were now taking a lot longer, or would fail completely with an error. As an example I asked Siri to find a folder on my Mac, which it did. I then asked it to open that folder in Finder, which it then said it wasn’t able to do.
With Spotlight, pressing return on the result would’ve immediately opened it in Finder. I use Spotlight many times throughout the day, to find things, to open apps, to jump directly to specific settings, and each time it felt like Siri AI added a layer of friction to those more basic tasks. I never really used basic Siri on Mac anyway.
Final thoughts
Maybe Apple will improve this in the future, or perhaps newer hardware will help (I have a base model iPhone 17), but while I do find Siri AI more capable than the old version, it doesn’t feel quick enough for the simpler tasks I do many times a day. Because of this, I turned it off and have returned to the old version of Siri, at least for now.
Some performance issues might be due to this being a beta version, but I also wonder if it’s a fundamental problem with spinning up a full LLM chatbot each time, rather than simply calling a local API. I follow several Apple bloggers through RSS and podcasts, and I’ve noticed quite a few of them share my experience here, so things might improve as iOS 27 matures. I’ll keep checking to see how it evolves.