Smart Siri: One Brick at a Time
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Smart Siri: One Brick at a Time
As WWDC approaches, I thought it would be useful to step back and evaluate where things stand with Apple’s plans for what I’ll call ‘Smart Siri,’ a yet-to-be-shipped Apple Intelligence feature that oddly doesn’t have a catchy marketing name of its own. So far, most Apple Intelligence features are pretty underwhelming. Some – like Writing Tools, webpage summaries, and the ChatGPT integration with Siri – can be useful but are done better by other apps, while the utility of other features is questionable at best.
For those of us who are into automation, perhaps the biggest letdown from WWDC 2024 has been the realization that we aren’t going to get Smart Siri anytime soon. At the conference, Apple showed what in hindsight turned out to be a concept video and not a demo. In the video, Siri accessed flight details, combining information from Mail, Contacts, Messages, and Calendar to determine a person’s arrival time. What’s more, Apple said this functionality would be available not just to first-party apps, but to third-party developers, too.