GoKawiilLike a great many people, I’ve been impatiently waiting to leave the Siri AI waitlist, and that finally happened last night.
It’s early, but what I’ve seen so far has me very excited for the future …
I recently confessed to being so impatient to try it that I did something nobody should ever do – installed a first developer beta on my daily driver iPhone. So far, this rash decision hasn’t come back to bite me.
I then got to watch my iPhone begin and finally complete the indexing process. This is where Apple Intelligence reviews the data on our devices and constructs the index it will subsequently use for Siri AI requests. That completed a couple of days ago, but didn’t immediately release me from the Siri AI waitlist. As soon as that happened, I dived right in.
Of course, you’d expect a first developer beta to have plenty of bugs and teething issues, and that’s obviously the case with this one. But my overwhelming first impressions have been how well Siri AI lives up to the promises Apple made for it.
Here’s a quick look at some of the real-world tasks I’ve been able to see working so far …
The first task I gave it was something I quite often need to do, and where the search feature in the Photos app has often disappointed: I asked it to find all photos and videos taken at a particular recurring event. (Yes, it was tango related; why do you ask?) It didn’t manage to identify matches by the name of the event, but as soon as I specified the location, it very quickly found all of the matching results – something the Photos app hasn’t managed in the past.
I asked it when a particular friend had visited me, and it identified the occasion based on both my calendar entry and a message he sent telling me he’d arrived.
I opened a webpage for a public event and asked Siri how I would get there. It correctly identified the venue, then opened Apple Maps and immediately started directions.
In the three weeks I’ve been in my new home, I’ve completed almost all of my planned home improvements with the generous help of a number of friends. I asked Siri what remained to be done, and it was able to immediately pull up the checklist of remaining items from my Notes app.
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