GoKawiilis The Verge’s senior AI reporter. An AI beat reporter for more than five years, her work has also appeared in CNBC, MIT Technology Review, Wired UK, and other outlets.
Apple kicked off its annual developer conference with bold promises about AI. The company, CEO Tim Cook said, would be “introducing new technologies and innovations that push the limits on what’s possible.” But its slew of announcements — centered on a brand-new “Siri AI” — had more to do with catching up.
After almost entirely neglecting Siri and punting its AI promises down the road in 2025, Apple went all in on the tech this year. It pitched Siri as an all-encompassing virtual assistant that ties together all your Apple devices, with multimodal features, a dedicated app, an all-in-one AI agent and more. Executives emphasized privacy again and again, saying that unlike many of its competitors, user data involved in agentic tasks would be processed on-device and via “private cloud compute” and then done away with.
Unlike Microsoft, Apple isn’t trying to prove it can go head-to-head with the likes of OpenAI or Anthropic unaided; its new Siri is fueled by Apple foundation models powered chiefly by Google Gemini. Instead, Apple marketed AI as a pragmatic, helpful addition to the devices people already own. “Some appear to be racing forward, pursuing AI for the sake of AI… at Apple, our mission has always been to turn the potential of advanced technology into helpful and intuitive products for everyone,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s SVP of software engineering. “Truly helpful AI must be centered around you and your needs.”
It’s no secret that Apple has consistently been behind in the AI race.
As tech companies desperately look for ways to make AI seem less threatening, Apple’s strategy fits right in. But after years of delays, the new Siri still won’t arrive until later this year, when it launches in beta (and there’s no timeline at all for the EU and China, something Apple blames on regulatory difficulties). The features largely mirror things other companies have already introduced. And it’s not clear if the payoff for Apple’s years-late AI strategy will be worth the wait.
The new Siri is supposed to frictionlessly pull together information from the internet, emails, texts, contacts, notes, and calendars, working with first-party apps and external tools alike. Apple suggests asking it when you’re free for a hangout with a friend and cutting off some of the back-and-forth of scheduling, or letting it add calendar appointments and draft texts or emails (and, perhaps creepily, mimic the writing voice you use with the recipient, like your boss vs. your best friend). The always-controversial Dynamic Island will display new AI-powered information cards from world events, weather, and your own calendar and reminders. Onstage demos showed off multi-step processes like asking when a musician’s next show is, then setting a reminder to buy tickets and playing one of their songs, or creating a recipe list for a World Cup watch party and sending an invitation via text message to a user’s group chat — including the (clearly AI-generated) menu.
One especially interesting feature, which was announced long ago but is now coming to fruition, is Siri’s on-screen awareness. In a WWDC presentation, Siri head Mike Rockwell looked at an Instagram photo of a nature spot, asked Siri where it was, then asked it to compare the location with a friend’s new address — which wasn’t saved anywhere and had only been mentioned once in text messages with said friend — and create a driving route with a stop at the friend’s new place. It worked. (Which is more than can be said for my current experiences with my iPhone’s bizarre text-message search.)
As tech companies desperately look for ways to make AI seem less threatening, Apple’s strategy fits right in.
The company went further overall into visual intelligence, allowing for AI-edited images in more styles and integrating Siri into the Photos app — users can look at an REI backpack and ask if a certain pair of boots will fit into it, or if the backpack will work as a carry-on for a specific flight that’s already been booked.
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