I come to bury Siri, not to praise it

Once upon a time there was an amazing little voice assistant that ended up being exclusively available in Apple products. It was called Siri and it was ahead of its time.

Because Siri seemed pretty magical when it first hit the iPhone; it would answer requests, find out information, and even do useful things such as taking photographs or naming songs you heard on the radio.

Available in numerous languages and with a range of male and female speaking voices, Siri remains the most widely distributed on-device chatbot in terms of language support. The assistant also scaled well, eventually appearing across Apple’s product lines. But critics and competitors now agree, Siri was too ambitious and failed to keep up with the times.

Back to the future

Cast your mind back to 2010 when Siri first appeared for iPhone. At that time, research into artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous technologies, ongoing since the launch of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL) in the 60’s, really accelerated. Apple led the charge, at least in terms of media profile, and Siri (which the company acquired soon after its introduction) was a leading-edge challenger in the nascent field

What was great about Siri was its fluffy, friendly image. 

Being an Apple product gave the solution access to a huge market of engaged and happy consumers willing to overcome their general concern at the dystopian application of AI to give the friendly little assistant a try. 

Building acceptance one error at a time

Arguably, Apple’s little assistant helped drive acceptance of technologies that have become critical to today’s cutting edge generative AI (genAI) systems, including:

Speech recognition

The idea of intelligent machines

Devices equipped to listen for your commands 24/7

Fast and real-time access to information on spoken request

Andr even real-time transcription.

Siri’s well-publicized errors actually helped build acceptance. After all, if you think about it, the fact that Siri sometimes made mistakes somehow helped humanize it. It is better to think that AI is stupid than to see it as threateningly smart.

This helped a skeptical public come to terms with AI, even while Apple’s assistant embodied a range of concepts people resisted. The logic was that it couldn’t be too bad if machines had this kind of intelligence built inside, right? It’s not as if they are smart enough to fully understand. Did it really matter if the tech listened to you when you thought it was switched off? 

What use would the information picked up be? (The answer: around 81% of UK consumers now claim to have experienced targeted consumer advertising generated by AI.)

Trust in me

We’ve had many debates on these topics since then — debates that show Apple’s commitment to user privacy in AI to be unique, and under attack from competitors and authoritarians alike. It’s almost as if, when some leaders heard Apple CEO Tim Cook warn this is surveillance, they chose to exploit it as an opportunity, rather than protect against it.

All the same, Siri helped people become more capable of placing trust in AI. 

Years later, OpenAI was introduced to a public already more accepting of such tech. That acceptance was to some extent built on the back of Siri adoption, and the appearance of other big name search assistants across the industry.

That acceptance means around 77% of devices in use today have some form of AI, and roughly 90% of organizations are using AI. Investment in the sector is booming, with the tech giants (Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta) spending $92.17 billion on capital expenditures in Q2 2025 alone. That’s up a whopping 66.67% on the year ago quarter, mainly on the strength of big investments in data centers, servers, and AI infrastructure.

Hope, hype, and history

The hype around AI is growing as fast as the investments.

Firms in the space are signing massive multi-billion dollar deals, governments are investing vast quantities of cash and resources to support AI industry development, and consumers are preparing to pay for all this investment come the inevitable industry collapse. 

Consumers will pay? Just look at history. We know this because that’s what happened following the dotcom boom, the South Sea Bubble collapse, and the financial crisis, when unsustainable investments came before a fall. We know this because by the time the highly probable AI industry collapse happens, the tech will be so deeply intertwined in our daily lives we will be told these companies are strategically important, making them “too big to fail.”

So we will bail them out.

What follows Siri? 

I come to bury Siri, not to praise it, because competitors say it was ambitious and failed to keep up with them. But if you’d never experienced Siri, would you have trusted ChatGPT? Perhaps a little, but not as much.

For the future of Siri, ask whether privacy continue to be baked in, or will governments get their way when it comes to data encryption, in which case no one will be private unless they can afford to be.

If governments do get their way and Apple is made to take privacy out of its algorithms, just how much of a threat will Siri become to other AI services, which already seem to respect privacy less? Siri doesn’t seem to know the answer (yet).

Though it probably has quite a lot of data to help it work one out.

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