I Fell for the New Siri AI, Then Quietly Went Back to My Old Habits

Key points

• Apple's redesigned Siri, tested in the iOS 27 developer beta (a pre-release version of Apple's iPhone software), impressed early testers with smarter, more conversational answers.
• The assistant can search your own phone's messages, photos and notes to find buried information faster than any manual search.
• Analysts at Forrester and IDC say most everyday iPhone users are unlikely to leave Apple's defaults regardless of how Siri compares to rival chatbots.
• A growing number of iPhone owners may avoid the new Siri entirely because of general distrust of AI tools.
• Apple's reputation for protecting user privacy could give Siri an edge that raw performance figures alone cannot measure.

The first impression was strong. A writer at Wired tested the developer beta of Apple's new Siri, a large language model-powered assistant (the same kind of technology behind chatbots like ChatGPT), by using it as a tour guide around San Francisco. The answers felt reliable. The interface looked clean. It seemed like Siri had finally grown up.

Then, slowly, she stopped using it.

What actually improved?

The new Siri can read everything on your phone: old text messages, photos, notes, emails. Ask it to find a three-year-old address a friend sent you, and it surfaces the answer in seconds. That is a real, everyday win.

World knowledge improved too. Earlier versions of Siri were infamous for misunderstanding questions or kicking users out to a browser. This version stays in the conversation. One beta tester, analyst Avi Greengart of Techsponential, said he found himself using Siri "not only more, but for more things" than ever before.

So why did enthusiasm fade?

Old habits are stubborn. Even after weeks of genuine use, the writer found herself back on Instagram and Yelp, typing and swiping the old way. She was also already comfortable with Anthropic's Claude, a rival AI chatbot she used regularly.

This is not a Siri-specific problem. Any new tool, however good, has to displace something you already do without thinking. That is a high bar.

Does it matter if power users walk away?

Probably not much. Dipanjan Chatterjee, a vice president and analyst at Forrester, the research and consultancy firm, put it plainly: Siri may take criticism for lagging behind competitors, but it will not cause Apple's massive customer base to go looking elsewhere.

Apple's deeper advantage may be trust. Ramon Llamas, a research director at the International Data Corporation, which tracks the global mobile device market, thinks iPhone owners who have avoided AI tools over privacy worries may be willing to try a version built by Apple, a company with a long record of prioritising user data protection.

That said, a separate group of users may refuse Siri's new features on principle, because the words "AI" on the label are enough to put them off. Feature updates will not move that crowd.

What does this mean for ordinary iPhone users?

If you do nothing, Siri's new version will still be there when you need it. The on-device search alone (finding old messages and photos instantly) is worth trying, even if you never become a daily user. You do not have to commit.

If you already use a chatbot you like, nothing is stopping you from keeping it. Siri and a third-party app can coexist on the same phone.

And if privacy is why you have avoided AI tools until now, Apple's approach is worth a closer look before writing the whole category off.