Thus far, AI devices like the Rabbit R1 and the Humane Ai pin have been all hype, no substance. The gadgets largely failed on their promises as true AI companions, but even if they didn't suffer consistent glitches from a rushed-to-market strategy, they still have a fundamental flaw: Why do I need a separate device for AI when I can do basically everything advertised with a smartphone?
It's a tough sell, and it's made me quite skeptical of AI hardware taking off in any meaningful way. I imagine anyone interested in AI is more likely to download the ChatGPT app and ask it about the world around them rather than drop hundreds of dollars on a standalone device. If you have an iPhone, however, you may soon be forgetting about an AI app altogether.
Although Apple has been totally late to the AI party, it might be working on something that actually succeeds where Rabbit and Humane failed: According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple is planning on a big overhaul to Siri for a later version of iOS 18: While rumors previously suggested Apple was working on making interactions with Siri more natural, the latest leaks suggest the company is giving Siri the power to control "hundreds" of features within Apple apps: You say what you want the assistant to do (e.g. crop this photo) and it will. If true, it's a huge leap from using Siri to set alarms and check the weather.
Gurman says Apple had to essentially rewire Siri for this feature, integrating the assistant with LLMs for all its AI processing. He says Apple is planning on making Siri a major showcase at WWDC, demoing how the new AI assistant can open documents, move notes to specific folders, manage your email, and create a summary for an article you're reading. At this point, AI Siri reportedly handles one command at a time, but Apple wants to roll out an update that lets you stack commands as well. Theoretically, you could eventually ask Siri to perform multiple functions across apps. Apple also plans to start with its own apps, so Siri wouldn't be able to interact this way within Instagram or YouTube—at least not yet.
It also won't be ready for some time: Although iOS 18 is likely to drop in the fall, Gurman thinks AI Siri won't be here until at least next year. Other than that, though, we don't know much else about this change at this time. But the idea that you can ask Siri to do anything on your smartphone is intriguing: In Messages, you could say "Hey Siri, react with a heart on David's last message." In Notes, you could say "Hey Siri, invite Sarah and Michael to collaborate on this note." If Apple has found a way to make virtually every feature in iOS Siri-friendly, that could be a game changer.
In fact, it could turn Siri (and, to a greater extent, your iPhone) into the AI assistant companies are struggling to sell the public on. Imagine a future when you can point your iPhone at a subject and ask Siri to tell you more about it. Then, maybe you ask Siri to take a photo of the subject, crop it, and email it to a friend, complete with the summary you just learned about. Maybe you're scrolling through a complex article, and you ask Siri to summarize it for you. In this ideal version of AI Siri, you don't need a Rabbit R1 or a Humane Ai Pin: You just need Apple's latest and greatest iPhone. Not only will Siri do everything these AI devices say they can, it'll also do everything else you normally do on your iPhone. Win-win.
The iPhone is the other side of the coin, though: These features are power intensive, so Apple is rumored to be figuring out which features can be run on-device, and which need to be run in the cloud. The more features Apple outsources to the cloud, the greater the security risk, although some rumors say the company is working on making even cloud-based AI features secure as well. But Apple will likely keep AI-powered Siri features running on-device, which means you might need at least an iPhone 15 Pro to run it.
The truth is, we won't know exactly what AI features Apple is cooking up until they hit the stage in June. If Gurman's sources are to be believed, however, Apple's delayed AI strategy might just work out in its favor.
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