Apple Finally Fixed Siri. It Just Took Long Enough for Everyone Else to Catch Up.
The new Siri is genuinely better. But after years of delays, Apple's AI assistant arrives in a world where its rivals can already write code, reason through problems, and complete complex tasks on your behalf.
Key points
- Apple has launched a major AI overhaul of Siri, its voice assistant, after years of delays.
- The updated Siri can handle more complex requests and is more useful in everyday situations than its predecessor.
- Rival AI assistants, including those built on large language models like OpenAI's GPT-4o and Google's Gemini, already perform tasks well beyond basic question-and-answer.
- The launch leaves Apple playing catch-up in a market it arguably helped create when the original Siri debuted in 2011.
Siri is finally smart. That sentence would have been a headline two years ago. Today, it barely clears the bar.
Apple has shipped a sweeping AI upgrade to Siri, its voice assistant built into iPhones, iPads and Macs. First reported by TechCrunch AI, the overhaul transforms Siri from a frequently mocked button-presser into something closer to the helpful assistant Apple always advertised it to be. Ask it to summarise an email, help draft a message, or find a photo from last summer: it now does those things without frustrating detours.
So what took so long?
Apple spent years rebuilding Siri's underlying architecture, the software foundation that decides how the assistant understands and responds to requests. That work took time, and competitors did not wait.
While Apple was rebuilding, a new class of AI tool emerged: large language models, the technology behind chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude. These models can write, reason, summarise, and even generate images or write working software code. Companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic turned those models into AI agents, software that can carry out multi-step tasks on its own, booking travel, writing reports, or debugging code with minimal hand-holding.
By the time Apple's new Siri arrived, "capable AI assistant" had become the floor, not the ceiling.
Does the new Siri actually work?
For everyday tasks, yes. The upgrade is real and noticeable for ordinary iPhone users.
Siri now understands follow-up questions, remembers context within a conversation, and connects more deeply with apps on your device. If you ask it to find an email from your dentist and then say "reply to that", it knows what "that" means. That sounds simple because it is, and it is exactly the kind of thing the old Siri failed at constantly.
| Feature | Old Siri | New Siri | Leading rivals (e.g. ChatGPT, Gemini) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Follow-up questions | Poor | Good | Strong |
| App integration | Limited | Improved | Varies |
| Code writing | No | No | Yes |
| Image generation | No | No | Yes |
| Multi-step task agents | No | Partial | Yes |
The gap the table shows is the real story. New Siri is better at the things most people use a voice assistant for. It cannot write software, generate images, or autonomously complete a chain of tasks the way OpenAI's GPT-4o or Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro can.
What does this mean for ordinary users?
If you own an iPhone and found the old Siri more annoying than useful, this update is worth trying again. The assistant is more reliable for quick, practical jobs: setting reminders, summarising notifications, drafting short replies.
For anything more ambitious, a dedicated app like ChatGPT or Google's Gemini remains the stronger choice for now. Apple has not closed the gap yet. It has just finally started running.
