Siri changed the world 14 years ago. Can it do it again?

I was there on that early October day 14 years ago when Apple–led on stage by Tim Cook, Phil Schiller, and Scott Forstall–rolled out iOS 5, the iPhone 4S, and one of the most important iOS features ever, Siri. (Steve Jobs wasn’t there, an empty seat left for him in the front row. He died the next day.)

Siri was the first true “voice assistant,” a voice-driven interface that Jobs clearly thought would be a huge part of the future of how we use our devices. He legendarily called Siri’s co-founder 24 straight days to express his desire to buy the app and add it to iOS.

While Apple got there first, competitors followed. In some ways, it’s the contrary example to what Apple normally does: Instead of entering a category late and perfecting it, Apple entered this category first and found itself limited by those early decisions. The company has been struggling to make Siri better for more than a decade now, and it’s generally perceived as being a feature that fails to live up to Apple’s brand promise.

The shift to modern AI-driven technology is an opportunity for Apple to revamp Siri, but the company has struggled to get a smarter version of Siri out the door. While the original version of Siri was more of a novelty, with every passing year, it becomes more critical to Apple’s future–and its troubling state becomes more of a red flag about the future of all of Apple’s products.

Siri is the cornerstone of so much of Apple’s future product line. But it’s a cracked and dirty cornerstone that, quite frankly, needs to be replaced. The rise of LLM-based chatbots and agents has only exacerbated the situation. According to numerous reports, Apple has tried to replace Siri, only to have failed and replaced the people responsible for the task. It’s now on the shoulders of Mike Rockwell, who shipped the Vision Pro and is respected within Apple.

Rockwell, who was very critical of Siri when he tried to make it central to the visionOS experience (and realized he couldn’t rely on it), now needs to fix the thing he used to complain about. I assume that since Rockwell is well regarded, this move isn’t a demotion but a desperate attempt by Apple to parachute in someone who can make it all make sense.

If you’re someone who has used Siri on Apple devices for a few years, you might wonder why this is suddenly such a big issue. After all, most of the time I tell my Apple Watch to set a tea timer for three minutes, and it does the job. The problem is that these days, tech companies are beginning to rely on voice interfaces tied into AI-based systems to perform more complex tasks, and this is an area Apple has struggled with. Hence, Rockwell was put in charge of the project.

What’s worse, Apple has been building products that rely on the existence of a smarter Siri–and is feeling the effects of it never appearing. First off, there’s the company’s embarrassing experience at WWDC24, where it introduced smart AI agent features that have yet to arrive, though they’re expected to finally appear in 2026.

But it gets worse. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple had a new “smart screen” product designed to interface with your home–its take on the Amazon Echo Show or Google Home Hub–ready to ship for the better part of a year now. An entire product, idling on the tarmac… because it was built to be driven by a smarter Siri and the new App Intents system in iOS.

You know Tim Cook hates the idea that Apple has hardware ready to go and can’t ship it because of software. It’s just so inefficient. But today’s Apple is clearly so much better at hardware than at software, and it’s a huge problem.

Apple is reportedly working, at long last, on a set of “smart glasses” to counter Meta’s smart Ray-Bans. It’s weird that Apple didn’t get into this product category sooner, since they’re basically AirPods in a different form. But if you think about it, any product like this is going to rely on Siri to get things done. (Even AirPods themselves, one of the best products Apple makes, are much less useful than they would be if a smarter Siri drove them.)

And a second-generation set of glasses, like those Meta is promising for the near future, will have a small display that will presumably display widgets very much like those intended for Apple’s delayed home device. You know, the one that can’t ship because that feature doesn’t work yet.

Let’s pull back from the accessories for a moment and also consider the big one: the iPhone itself. Apple’s smartphone competitors are making hay with their amazing array of AI features, mostly because they know that it’s Apple’s weak spot. With Apple Intelligence, Apple is trying to catch up, but let’s be honest: Siri is the core of any intelligence and automation story on the iPhone, and Siri’s still stuck in the past. A failure to properly move Siri into the future threatens the iPhone itself, and that is an existential threat to Apple. No pressure, Mike Rockwell!

The good news here is that if Apple can’t get its own AI technology up to speed to power Siri, it’s got alternatives: partners with their own AI tech. Reports suggest that while Apple is working on its own AI models to drive Siri, it’s also testing outside models. Given that OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google all have models that would at least be an upgrade from Siri (even if they’re not what Apple would ideally build for itself), it would at least presumably allow Apple to start shipping products that rely on a smarter assistant.

In terms of strategy, using a partner to power Siri also might buy Apple time to get its own technology right and replace that outside tech over time.

As we look to the future, this is likely to become even more important. I’m a bit of an AI skeptic–I think it’s vastly overhyped–but even without the hype, it’s easy to see that it will still be a huge part of future tech devices. It’s hard to imagine that more of our interactions with devices won’t be done by voice, leveraging the power of AI software to interpret what we say and do our bidding.

Back in the day, Siri was first. Things got messy. But now Siri must be one of Apple’s top priorities, for the sake of all its future products.