Apple’s WWDC 2025 had new software, Formula 1 references, and a piano man crooning the text of different app reviews. But one key feature got the short end of the stick: Siri.
00:00Apple's WWDC this year had a lot of fanfare attached.
00:06New software, Formula One references, and a Piano Man crooning the text of different app reviews.
00:12Best if I've ever set my sorry eyes upon.
00:17But the elephant in the room, or not in the room, was Siri.
00:24Even as Apple's famous AI assistant has been marketed pretty hard over the past year as a key part of the company,
00:29AI-centric plans for the future of everything, it was barely mentioned at all.
00:34Honestly, the most attention Siri got at WWDC this year was when Apple explained that some of its previously promised features were behind schedule.
00:42As we've shared, we're continuing our work to deliver the features that make Siri even more personal.
00:48In the keynote, Apple said it had updated Siri to be more natural and more helpful,
00:52but personalization features that it promised us a year ago and said it would roll out by now still aren't here.
00:58It was especially noticeable because Apple's marketing push for Siri last year included TV ads for a revamped Siri that could give a user more control over their apps and personalized answers.
01:09You met Zach Wingate at Cafe Grinnell.
01:12Those ads were later pulled because those features weren't coming anytime soon.
01:17Apple SVP Craig Federighi said the company was continuing the work to deliver those features.
01:23This work needed more time to reach our high-quality bar, and we look forward to sharing more about it in the coming year.
01:29Apple criticism has been mounting for a while, with people saying Apple Intelligence and Siri are falling behind competitors like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in the generative AI race.
01:40Those companies are showing off advanced voice modes, multimodal camera systems, and lots of other features, and Siri is, well, Siri.
01:49Apple's AI models aren't often mentioned alongside its competitors, and Apple Intelligence had a rocky debut that included notification summaries that were so off the mark that the company had to disable them for some app categories.
02:01Obviously, all AI models have issues. I mean, Google told people to eat rocks, but Apple hasn't seemed able to get any of this right.
02:10At the conference, Apple's strategy seemed to be rolling out a lot of small, functional updates powered by Apple Intelligence and partly by ChatGPT that could help it catch up to competitors.
02:21Apple's image playground now integrates with OpenAI's tech, and users can tap into ChatGPT to change a friend's photo into the style of an oil painting or other types of art.
02:30Apple gave developers access to the on-device large language model behind Apple Intelligence.
02:36It also debuted live translation features that let users translate between languages in messages, FaceTime, and phone calls.
02:51And Apple pushed visual intelligence search features that allow users to search and take action on anything they're viewing across different apps.
02:58Users can ask ChatGPT questions on what they're viewing or search Google, Etsy, and other apps to find similar products or images.
03:04To be honest, some of these features are things I've seen before from Google and Amazon.
03:08I was personally most excited about the live translation features because that's something I can actively use while I'm traveling and is something I haven't quite seen before.
03:16Some people had been waiting for Apple to use WWDC as an opportunity to announce it was expanding its AI options beyond ChatGPT, like allowing Siri to tap into Google's Gemini for complex user queries.
03:30But that didn't happen this time around either. And it's something we might be waiting on for a few more months or even till the end of the year.
03:37Apple does some things with AI pretty well, like on-device search, better audio quality, and smart call screening.
03:44But a lot of tech giants, including Apple, have been promising for a while that super smart AI assistants are the future of the industry.
03:52We know what Apple's is supposed to be because Apple showed us last year.
03:56But this year, Siri missed the party entirely.
03:59And it's hard not to wonder just how far behind it really is.
