Hey Siri, this is what I really want from AI

After two years and a $250 million lawsuit, Apple’s revamped AI Siri is on its way to your phones, laptops, and even mixed reality headsets, if you’re one of the three people who already uses an Apple Vision Pro. Apple revealed a slew of new information at its WWDC keynote on Monday about these long-awaited, AI-powered updates that could take advantage of the fact that our devices are supposedly “designed with Apple’s intelligence.”

To be honest, it’s hard for AI to impress me enough to use it in my daily life. I still don’t trust LLM’s ability to consistently provide accurate information, I find it ethically unacceptable (and uncool) to use artificial intelligence to help me write, and I don’t feel an insatiable desire to know what I would look like as a Studio Ghibli character. But every once in a while, I’m tempted by the promise of artificial intelligence.

That’s how I felt watching demos of Apple’s Siri AI, which envision a world where your phone comes with an always-on assistant that knows everything about you and can help you keep track of all the conversations happening on about a dozen different apps on your phone at any given moment.

To paraphrase Katy Perry, it feels so wrong (what are the privacy implications?), but it also feels so right (I’m too immersed in my phone and begging for help analyzing everything).

I want Siri to be my Emily from The Devil Wears Prada — a “second mind” that anticipates my needs before I even know what they are. I want Siri to read my texts and automatically organize an event when a friend and I decide we’ll meet for dinner on Thursday. I want Siri to remind me when I walk by CVS that I have a prescription ready to pick up. If I forget to respond to an important work email, I want Siri to remind me that I haven’t responded yet.

Siri AI won’t be able to do it all out of the box, but it’s moving in the right direction. In one example at WWDC, Justin Teti, a senior Apple manager who works on AI engineering, asked the intelligent assistant to remind him of a candy his daughter had recently mentioned. Siri searches through Titi’s phone to find a text message from about a month ago, when his daughter mentioned she wanted to make coconut cupcakes. It’s simple, but asking Siri to find that message saves time, rather than scrolling up through an entire month of conversation looking for that specific text.

The new and improved Siri is designed to use “personal context,” which refers to any information you put into native Apple apps, like iMessage, Notes, Calendar, Mail, Photos, and more. Siri will also be aware of what’s on your screen, so for example, if you scroll through a photo of a beautiful garden on Instagram, you can ask it to know where that garden is. (We still don’t know if Siri will be able to integrate into non-native Apple apps, and it looks like it may be up to developers to make that happen.)

There are already apps like Poppy and Poke trying to create this kind of agentic AI on mobile. But the irony of AI-powered personal assistants is that you have to give up a lot of personal data and privacy to make them work properly, which can cause you more headaches (remember that time when the Meta researcher ran OpenClaw and accidentally deleted her entire inbox?).

I can’t say I like giving my personal data to any tech giant, but Apple at least seems to care more about security than other FAANG (MANGO?) companies. On-device AI will always be more secure and less power-intensive than cloud computing, where data is processed directly on your phone. (This is how existing Apple Intelligence features like email summaries and AI emojis are built.) But for the more complex tasks that Siri will take on, Apple has been pioneering private cloud computing (PCC), a way for devices to analyze complex data across the cloud without even exposing your data to Apple itself. (If PCC can be hacked, it hasn’t happened yet, though Apple is offering a $1 million bounty to catch the bug.)

In a recent conversation with writer Calvin Kasolek — who is so internet savvy that he wrote a novel set exclusively on Slack — she admitted what seems like a forbidden desire to outsource “the management of my life” entirely to artificial intelligence.

“When you’re talking about the technology junk in your life… I think the question is: Is everything you have essential?” If it’s necessary, isn’t it worth developing the skill and spending the time to do so? “I don’t think these are skills that one should allow to atrophy,” Calvin told me.

He makes a good point: Maybe instead of asking Siri to remind me of the TV show my friend told me I should watch, I could pay more attention when I’m talking to my friends. I don’t want to get into the habit of forgetting more important details in my conversations.

“I’m sorry, but all the commercials that say, ‘What if I had the computer to buy my kid a birthday present?’ I’m like, ‘What if you learned what your kid likes?’ … Like, I don’t know, man, it’s like [they] “I don’t want to do the basic work of being a person,” he said.

Maybe when I say I want Ciri to be like Emily in “The Devil Wears Prada,” I should remember that Emily’s character is on the verge of collapse. I know I can’t psychologically influence Siri the way Miranda Priestly affected Emily, but will I be the kind of person who can’t function without the friendly robot voice on my phone? Do I want to be that person?

At least if you decide to opt out of all this, Apple will make it possible. Unlike Google’s controversial search overhaul, the new AI Siri can be turned on and off, so you don’t have to use it. Until then, I’ll have to decide if it’s worth tasting the forbidden fruit of Siri AI.