Zac Hall writing for 9to5Mac: Apple’s Competitive Edge in AI Hinges on These Three Unreleased Siri Features

It feels like a make-or-break moment for Siri, and these three remaining iOS 18 features are key indicators of Apple’s ability to leverage AI with Siri.

These three Siri features are AI uses that only Apple can provide — not because of Apple’s AI talent, but because of Apple’s position as the platform operator.

I know each writer is different, but I get the vibe that 9to5Mac thinks Apple is the leader in LLMs and AI tech, and everything else is an afterthought that a few people on “tech twitter” use and aren’t mainstream at all, so the post title had me ready to lay into this post. Thankfully, there is a good amount of reason here, so I’ll retract the claws.

Hall hits on the biggest thing in the above quote, noting that Apple has every single advantage in the world in giving you a personalized AI chatbot that can do more than any other bot out there. They’re the platform holder, they have the unique ability to know everything you do on your phone, and they should be able to leverage this to give us something no one else can offer. I’d argue that of all the Siri updates shipped so far in iOS 18, the new glow animation is the only thing most people could tell you has changed. If it’s smarter, I can’t tell, but that new glow is kinda nice. We’ll see if the mythical iOS 18.4 brings all the brilliance people are pinning their hopes on, but if the past 15 years have taught me anything, it’s that Siri, just like Bluetooth, is always about to get better next year…for real this time…

If Siri can’t keep up, a strong case will mount for Apple to support changing the default voice assistant and allowing competing voice assistants to hook into iOS. Otherwise, standalone AI devices will actually have a reason to exist.

Again, there may have been a few years where Siri was the top dog in the voice assistant game, but Google’s been in the lead by miles for the last decade or so and Apple hasn’t allowed them to be the default voice assistant on the iPhone. I don’t think they’ll start now. I think it’s pretty clear that Siri doesn’t compete on features, it “wins” on iOS by being the only option.

As a final aside, I’m an app developer now, and I was thinking recently if there were any LLM-powered features I could build into my app. The answer so far is no, but the ideas that I did come up with weren’t even possible with Apple Intelligence, I would have had to integrate a third-party tool like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini.