by Jason Snell
David Pogue tests Siri AI
David Pogue, in his newsletter:
The new AI Siri came out this week as part of OS 27 for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Mac, and it’s a life changer. A phone changer. It replaces most Google searches, most ChatGPT or Claude interactions, and cumulative hours of fumbling and searching and dragging and copying and finding and tapping and pasting….
The hardest part will be getting out of the habit of opening apps, and remembering that you have Siri. Give it a few tries. Learn to trust it. You’ll save incredible amounts of time and fumbling.
I used the beta-test version all summer, growing more and more excited. Now that the final version is out, I wanted to see how often it gets things right. It is AI, after all. So I ran it through 125 tests.
David’s absolutely right—Siri AI really works. It’s not perfect, but it’s quite good. The trick is, as he puts it, “remembering you have Siri” (and that it’s useful now). I have so thoroughly trained myself not to use Siri that I struggle to remember to use it when I’m not explicitly trying to test it.
In any event, Pogue provides 125(!) examples of Siri prompts he issued, and details the results—including some surprising successes and a few failures. (The failures clearly point to where Apple needs to put its attention as it improves this feature, especially when it comes to connecting to more apps, including Health.)