USAToday Columns
TECHnalysis Research president Bob O'Donnell writes columns for the Tech section of USAToday.com and those columns are posted here. These columns are also often reposted on other sites, including MSN and other publishing partners of USAToday.

June 12, 2026

Apple finally delivers on original Siri promise

By Bob O'Donnell

Fifteen years ago, the Siri vision was grand. A personal digital assistant that would be at your beck and call to find whatever information you wanted and do whatever you requested in a manner that was customized to you.

The reality, however, was not all that. Misunderstood questions, frustrating responses, and little more than fancy timer settings was about all we got.

At this week’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), though, Apple seems to have gone back to that original perspective and finally delivered what we always hoped Siri would be—an intelligent, always connected, genuinely helpful colleague that can find information, assist in completing tasks, and take advantage of the incredible capabilities that our modern devices now have. Importantly, given Apple’s strong focus on privacy, it can do all of this in a way that doesn’t expose your data to anyone—not even Apple.

Leveraging new AI-powered Apple Intelligence functions, the forthcoming Siri AI—expected in beta form later this year—brings the kind of practical, useful smarts that regular people are probably going to really like. Essentially, it’s a big step towards making your devices a lot smarter, because these new features let you start interacting with your phones, computers, and tablets in a much more intuitive fashion.

Want to answer a question, get help writing an email, score a reservation at your favorite restaurant? Just ask—either by voice or typing it in if the environment calls for it. I call it AI for the masses.

Of course, it’s fair to argue that Apple is kind of late to this party. After all, tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and more have offered some of these capabilities for a while. Plus, Apple originally made announcements about a new Siri back in 2024, then ended up cancelling those original plans and retooling things.

But, as fate would have it, the rest of the tech industry quickly zoomed past the original AI chatbot interaction model and have focused all of their efforts on agentic AI—which essentially extends AI capabilities into autonomously doing more sophisticated tasks. And in work environments, the impact of these new tools has been profound, particularly for things like software programming tasks. As a result, in business, agentic AI rules the day.

For regular consumers, however, it’s nowhere near as clear that agentic AI is what people want or need. In fact, I’m guessing that most of the personal requests that people make to chatbots are relatively simple, particularly as they’re getting used to the technology. What is critically important is understanding and responding to those requests with the knowledge of your personal context—and that’s a key differentiating capability that Apple has brought to the new Siri.

In other words, by being able to see and understand the information on your device, Siri can respond in a way that’s meaningful to you. For example, if you want to change an upcoming flight, and in the context of a phone call or text thread with an airline Siri can automatically provide you with your confirmation code included in a previous email you received, that’s incredibly helpful.

So, luckily for Apple, they find themselves in the position of being “fashionably late” to the world of AI chatbots with the new Siri AI. They don’t need to worry about trying to support the most advanced agentic AI applications right now, because most consumers are still just beginning to figure out what AI is and what it can do for them.

By providing practical examples like how the new Siri can find out when and where your favorite artist is playing, purchase tickets, send a few to your friends and book a pre-concert dinner at your favorite restaurant all in a simple spoken request, Apple can help people start to understand the art of the possible. Fundamentally, that’s the most important impact Siri AI will likely have, because it’s going to introduce hundreds of millions of people to all the amazing things that well-structured AI can do.

Another interesting part of the new Siri story is how Apple is achieving its AI efforts. Rather than doing everything in the cloud, Apple is focusing on combining the computing resources on your iPhones, Macs, and other devices along with what Apple calls Private Cloud Compute—essentially Apple’s own version of the cloud. In theory, this helps with the privacy stance that Apple has been making with Siri, but the new hybrid AI architecture also opens up the possibility to do even more on the device and to be less dependent on cloud computing resources. In fact, some of the new transcription features and more dynamic voices that Apple introduced are created with a special Apple AI model that currently only runs on Apple devices with the most advanced AI processing chips, including the iPhone 17 Pro, M3+ Macs, and M4+ iPads.

It's rare that companies that are late to major tech advancements end up benefitting from that timing. But for Apple, it looks like the new Siri AI may be arriving right on time.

Here's a link to the original column: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnists/2026/06/12/apple-finally-delivers-on-original-siri-promise/90515098007/

Columnist Bob O'Donnell is the president and chief analyst of TECHnalysis Research, a market research and consulting firm. The views and opinions expressed in this column are the author's and do not necessarily reflect those of USA TODAY. You can follow him on X @bobodtech.