I’ve spent a lot of time testing the new Siri. Overall I like it and believe this will become a very powerful tool but definitely think it needs work.

- Example: “Siri for the lights that are already on in the family room, can you put those lights to 50% brightness?” -> All the lights turn on incorrectly. This is a two step process. Get information from Home and then execute command with that info.

- Example: “Remind me to call back Joe at 5pm.” -> Siri oddly has trouble with this. Asking me what time after I give this command. Is it not hearing full command?

- Example: It seems to ask me to clarify the name of something when that name is readily available in recent personal context. Like recent 5 messages. It should be able to know some of this stuff as I’m most likely operating on recent stuff.

It seems to be hampered in some way. Gemini should be able to handle that tool call really easily.

Other things are great. Like I have my checking account and routing number buried in Notes somewhere. When I’m in safari and ask it to autofill with the routing number from notes. It does it. Amazing.

I’m so bullish on LLMs and my personal context but there are some kinks here that hamper performance so far.

Siri AI feels like a beta version (I think it officially is?). It’s unaware indexing isn’t done yet so it just tells me “I can’t find any photos of Italy” although there’s many thousands. Then it tells me how to let it access my photos using nonexistent iOS settings, even though permissions aren’t the problem. Amateurish.

I miss the old John Siracusa reviews on Ars. Was always a vibe to read thru those while taking snapshots and pulling the latest update image.