Apple has worked hard to improve Siri in the wake of the generative AI revolution. In iOS 18.2, it understands complex queries more easily, has a deeper knowledge set (especially around Apple's own products), and can even hand off to ChatGPT when it can't help on its own.
I am a big fan of how Apple is handling AI. Apple Intelligence is a very clever system made up of local and cloud models working in tandem to ensure a combination of a high degree of security and impressive performance, particularly around everyday tasks.
The problem for Apple is that this isn't enough to compete in a market that includes ChatGPT Advanced Voice, Gemini Live, Meta AI Voice, and even startups like Hume. Siri has improved — and there's more upgrades on the way with personalized help and the ability to voice control your apps — but I still can’t have a conversation with it, and the inclusion of ChatGPT has made Siri seem lazy.
Including the ability to send complex queries off to OpenAI's chatbot was a stroke of genius for Apple and plays into the fact that they are happy to use third-party products when they offer a better service. The problem is they don't go far enough.
Siri is out of date and needs a lot of work to bring it up to modern standards. Apple should just invest in and replace it with Advanced Voice. Company insiders even admit it is at least two years behind the industry leaders.
The company is big enough that they could do a deal with OpenAI to run versions of Advanced Voice on their own hardware and infrastructure, keeping it within the secure cloud enclave that they've developed for Apple Intelligence.
Let us choose our AI companion
There are already clones of Advanced Voice on the market that are different to OpenAI's offering, including Microsoft's own Copilot.
We're going to see more of them as OpenAI opens up its real-time API, giving developers the ability to create their own chatbots niche to its platform.
Voice will be everywhere, and the expectation is that it will be conversational, and Siri is a long way off from that being the case.
I'm not just beating on Apple; Amazon has exactly the same problem with Alexa, and rumors suggest Amazon is also looking outside the company for a solution.
If Apple doesn't want to go the whole hog and completely replace Siri with Advanced Voice or another third-party speech-to-speech conversational AI, it should do what it's enforced to do with browsers and the App Store in Europe — give us the choice.
Create an entirely new market for voice AI, a section of the App Store similar to the browser section, where I can swap Siri for any AI assistant of my choice. Schools could even swap it for an assistant trained on their specific curriculum, or companies could have their own corporate voice on company devices.
Apple could even keep Siri as the default, but they need to do more than they've done, and for me, the quickest way to do that is to replace it with Advanced Voice, train it on Apple's own voices, apply its own guard rails, and let me chat to my phone.
