To Truly Fix Siri, Apple May Have to Backtrack on One Key Thing—Privacy

WIRED

23-03-2025

The Siri that was promised back in 2011 never quite materialized. Now the big upgrade promised as part of Apple Intelligence is delayed 'indefinitely.' Why can't Apple get Siri right?
Apple Intelligence is fast becoming a disaster.
Announced in June 2024 at Apple's World Wide Developer Conference, the artificial intelligence system arrived on the whole iPhone 16 family in October (and iPhone 15 Pro handsets, too), bringing things like generative tools for folks who can't be bothered to write emails, and summaries for those who can't be bothered to read, well, just about anything. December's addition, Genmoji—an AI emoji generator—didn't exactly bring much by way of excitement either.
At the heart of the Apple Intelligence we were actually promised is a new Siri, an upgraded version of Apple's voice assistant, enhanced with some of the same smarts that made ChatGPT so beguiling at its launch in 2022. Amazon made similar moves recently with its upgrade to Alexa+, but a more intelligent Siri is still MIA.
It was meant to be here already. After initially postponing the full rollout from April to May this year, Apple has now had to delay its launch indefinitely. According to a recent report from Bloomberg, Siri simply doesn't work properly, and by the time Apple's marketing department started pitching Apple Intelligence's upgrades to the iPhone-buying public last year, it was little more than a 'barely working prototype.' An iPhone 16 feature is becoming an iPhone 17 one, if we're lucky.
It might seem unfathomable that a multitrillion dollar company could allow its promises to so far outstrip its deliverables. But when you look back, this story echoes throughout the life of Siri so far. Big Promises
In October 2011 Apple first introduced us to Siri as a core feature of the iPhone 4S. This was years before the first Amazon Echo in 2014, and was only the day before the death of Steve Jobs, who had resigned as CEO less than two months prior.
This Siri announcement was accompanied by a promo video of the assistant in use, depicting what seemed like a slice of tech magic.
Sure, Siri's voice sounds stilted by today's standards, and iOS 5's visual style looks almost Victorian to 2025 eyes. But that breezy sense of talking to a digital assistant casually, with no attention paid to your wording—and getting just what you want, complete with context? We're still not there 13 years later. The original Siri was, at least partly, an illusion.
The hope had been that Apple would finally make good on those early promises with the next major release of Apple Intelligence, which apparently infuses Siri with more of the smarts we've come to associate with chatbots. Apple says Siri will be 'equipped with awareness of your personal context, the ability to take action in and across apps, and product knowledge about your devices' features and settings.'
It's no less than the 'start of a new era,' apparently.
But it is also unavoidably reminiscent of the gulf of expectations and realities that typified the original Siri. Those who can cast their minds back to the 2011 launch of Siri may also know it arrived as a standalone iPhone app in 2010. It was originally not part of Apple at all.
Siri was a project spun up by SRI International, originally known as Stanford Research Institute, and DARPA. That's a research agency of the U.S. Department of Defense.
Siri was spun-off into its own company before being acquired by Apple, reportedly for somewhere north of $200 million, just a few months after it launched as an iOS app. You can still see that original app version of Siri running on YouTube.
'I'd like a romantic place for Italian food near my office,' Siri cofounder Tom Gruber asks the antiquated Siri app, before using it to make a booking—with another voice prompt—all within the app. Once again, it's an AI assistant goal we've still not quite reached all these years later. Hello Google Duplex.
Still, Apple was entranced by the possibilities, as was then-CEO Steve Jobs. '​​This was Steve's last deal,' Siri cofounder Tom Gruber told WIRED. 'He was personally involved in all stages of the deal, negotiating the deal and following through, making sure that we were successful at Apple after they bought us.'
However, other Apple execs who were around at the time paint the picture of a very flawed digital assistant that was never really up to the job that Apple sold us. Early Siri worked, but only within highly limited functional silos.
'What we acquired was a demo that would work great for a couple of people but wouldn't scale to our user base … there was a lot of smoke and mirrors behind the original Siri implementation,' former Apple exec Richard Williamson told the Computer History Museum in a 2017 interview so long it involves costume changes.
'This notion of AI? It wasn't AI … it was a hot mess,' Williamson said. "It's super easy to trick Siri. There's no NLP [natural language processing], there's no contextualization of words. It's just keyword matching.'
But now, even with AI, Siri reportedly still can't be relied on to actually work when facing real-world use. The key question is why? Chatbot tech may not be fully mature, but it is at least prevalent enough to be used daily by nontechnophiles on competing platforms.
One confounding factor: Apple's approach to this stuff is likely not close to the norm. You'll need to be comfortable handing over large amount of data to make Alexa work its best, while OpenAI's Sam Altman seems happy to destroy entire categories of jobs at the altar of progress. But Tim Cook and Apple? A cleaner, more positive image has for decades been part of the company's appeal, and that includes a very clear focus on privacy.
'There's one good excuse for [Apple] waiting, and that is if you really hold the privacy and data stewardship value as a sacred right. And [Apple] does say those kinds of words,' says Gruber.
'If they really hold that as a top priority, they may be running into conflicts of interest. If they send all the queries to OpenAI and give them all the context OpenAI needs they could probably do more, but then they're giving up on their privacy guarantee.'
A privacy focus was also perceived for years as a reason Siri never felt as good to use as, for example, Google Assistant. It seemed less intelligent, less naturalistic, because it literally knew less about you. And regardless of quite how true that was, it's part of the root of the problem in this new Siri too. A Tale of Two Halves
The upcoming Siri is based around two core components. A small language model runs on the iPhone itself, while more complex queries are offloaded to OpenAI. You'll have to grant the phone permission to do so.
It is estimated Apple's on-iPhone AI systems consist of around 3 billion parameters, where some estimates place the number of parameters in OpenAI's GPT-4 at 1.8 trillion—six hundred times the number. DeepSeek made headlines as a more efficient, lean AI model in early 2025, but it still comprises a reported 671 billion parameters.
The AI model needs to be small to fit in an iPhone, but Apple's is tiny by the standards of any chatbots you may have tried. And it begs the question of how much Siri will actually be able to do, before simply giving up and reverting to a server-based, OpenAI-powered interaction—much like those of Microsoft CoPilot or Amazon Alexa+. Is it going to be anything more than a toy?
Some of Apple's proposed uses for the smarter Siri are unnervingly similar to those of Samsung's Bixby, an assistant that has been around since 2017. Bixby has never been considered a serious draw for prospective Samsung Galaxy buyers, spending much of its life as the punchline to geeky jokes, even if it can control some phone settings—as the new Siri supposedly will.
'What hasn't gotten better are those really great mobile use cases we were shown,' says Gruber, referring to those original Siri promises, like sending a message hands-free or getting it to read out one you receive. And that's before you even got to the more complex stuff.
'Complicated and very personal uses cases like travel or entertainment—you know, like 'help me find a movie near me that meets my interests'—the ones that keep being shown, it's really hard to do," adds Gruber.
And, even more difficult, you might think, with the stripped-back, on-device AI technology Apple has chosen to pursue with Apple Intelligence. Apple promises a Siri that reacts to your 'personal context'—something users have been calling for since its inception. But based on the reports we're hearing from the outside, this could have no more substance to it than the 'smoke and mirrors' used to excite the public about Siri back in 2010.