Siri’s a disaster, and it feels like Apple doesn’t care

Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized roundup. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to give it a read during lunch or dinner hours too.

Ask a Siri question

It’s been a few weeks now since the excitement of the WWDC 2023 keynote presentation, and the triumphs and disappointments have had a chance to sink in. There was plenty of the former, but several of the latter, and the one that continues to sting–particularly when I have an especially bad week with the feature in question–is the lack of reassurance about Siri.

Apple is surely aware that Siri is bad, and that it needs to be improved. But looking back through our coverage of WWDC, an event that’s all about software, I can find only two mentions of the ailing voice assistant. One is the news that it will soon intelligently handle multiple commands in succession without having to be asked properly each time; this is a welcome if belated addition, coming years after Alexa and Google Assistant gained the same capability. And the other relates to it losing one word from its trigger phrase, which strikes me as disastrous. As it stands, Siri is constantly nagging and bothering me when I don’t want it to turn on, just because it (wrongly) thinks it’s heard the words “Hey Siri.” When it’s listening out for just “Siri,” my life is going to be hell. Realistically, I’ll probably have to turn off that feature and access Siri with a button press as before. There’s progress for you.

Neither of the stage mentions, you’ll notice, made any reference to Siri’s accuracy. Which is… odd.

What I wanted to hear from Apple this June was reassurance that it understands that Siri needs work and that the company’s people are on it. Maybe it would be a lot to expect an admission of failure on such a public stage, but Federighi could have done one of his self-deprecating jokes, while slickly segueing into a hype job about the improvements coming down the pipe. I mean, what happened to Operation Bobcat, Craig?

I don’t understand why Siri isn’t Priority No. 1 at Apple Park right now. Because–and I must apologize to regular readers for harking back to a favorite complaint here–the voice assistant simply isn’t fit for purpose, and its deficiencies taint my experience with nearly every Apple device I own. That includes, as previously mentioned, the devices (such as the Apple Watch) on which I very rarely use Siri, because Siri won’t take a hint and pushes its way into my life anyway. But it’s particularly infuriating on the ones where I rely on Siri, which is to say the HomePods in the living room and kitchen, and the iPhone, hooked up to CarPlay when selecting songs on a drive.

Ask for a song that shares a name with the album it’s on, and Siri will assume you mean the album (which surely the statistics would argue against?) and blithely start playing that instead. Ask for a song that’s incredibly famous in the studio version, and Siri will inexplicably plump for an obscure live recording with unclear vocals. Ask for a song you play all the freaking time but this time say the name of the artist slightly less clearly than Siri likes, and it will guess a same-named song by someone else who you’ve never listened to in your life. As far as musical choices go, Siri is like that wedding DJ who patiently listens to your grandma’s request for Perry Como, then slams on the Andrew WK record he was going to play all along. It would be funny if it wasn’t so annoying.

Remember when Apple apologized for Maps? That was great! Taking responsibility is cool. Resolving to improve things is cool. Let’s all admit that Siri is a dog’s dinner, then we can get back to salivating over Vision Pro, and I can stop writing these articles. Otherwise, the beatings will continue until morale improves.

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The rumor mill

The iPhone 15 is getting a U2 chip to prepare for Vision Pro integration.

Sorry, iPhone SE fans. The new model probably won’t arrive until 2025… if at all.

An FCC filing suggests Apple is launching an AirPods Max competitor from Beats.

Podcast of the week

Apple revealed iOS 17 at WWDC, and it looks like it’s more than a maintenance release. We talk about the features of iOS 17 that caught our eye, in this episode of the Macworld Podcast.

You can catch every episode of the Macworld Podcast on Spotify, Soundcloud, the Podcasts app, or our own site.

Software updates, bugs, and problems

If you’re reading this on an Apple device, go update it right now.

New Maps, Calendar, and search integrations are coming to Chrome on iOS.

You can now home-repair your iPhone 14 and M2 MacBook.

And with that, we’re done for this week’s Apple Breakfast. If you’d like to get regular roundups, sign up for our newsletters. You can also follow us on Twitter or on Facebook for discussion of breaking Apple news stories. See you next Monday, and stay Appley.