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 phone's messages and photos to surface buried information faster than any manual search.
• Forrester analyst Dipanjan Chatterjee says 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 because of general distrust of AI tools.
• Apple's reputation for protecting user privacy could give Siri an edge that raw performance figures alone can't measure.

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 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's 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. Avi Greengart, founder and lead analyst at Techsponential, said he found himself using Siri "not only more, but for more things" than ever before, with world knowledge "vastly better than before."

So why did enthusiasm fade?

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

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

Does it matter if power users walk away?

Probably not much. Dipanjan Chatterjee, a principal analyst at Forrester, put it plainly: Siri may bear criticism for lagging behind competitors, but it won't cause Apple's installed base to go looking elsewhere.

Apple's deeper advantage may be trust. We've been tracking this privacy-as-differentiator argument since our first iOS 27 story on 13 July. Ramon Llamas, a research director at the International Data Corporation, which tracks the global mobile device market, thinks iPhone owners who've 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.

A separate group of users may refuse Siri's new features on principle, because the word "AI" on the label is enough to put them off. Feature updates won't 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 don't have to commit.

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

And if privacy is why you've avoided AI tools until now, Apple's approach deserves a closer look before writing the whole category off. Whether that trust holds after millions of people actually use it is what I'll be watching.