Siri

Siri is a program made by Apple that understands spoken sentences and reacts to them. You say “Hey Siri, set an alarm for seven o’clock,” and the device sets the alarm. Such programs are called voice assistants. Siri has been built into every iPhone since 2011 and today also runs on the iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and the company’s headphones. Apple didn’t invent Siri itself back then, but rather bought a small company that had developed the technology. It was the first voice assistant that hundreds of millions of people actually carried around in their pocket.

From pioneer to laggard

When Siri appeared in 2011, it felt like science fiction. A phone you could talk to was completely new to most people. Amazon and Google only followed years later with Alexa and the Google Assistant. Siri made the idea of a talking computer part of everyday life.

Since 2022, the picture has flipped. Chatbots like ChatGPT can write coherent texts, ask follow-up questions, and keep track of context across several sentences. Siri, on the other hand, mainly understands individual, short commands. Anyone who probes further often just gets the sentence “Here’s what I found on the web.” The former pioneer is now considered to be far behind.

That’s why Siri is a constant topic in business news. Apple has announced it will rebuild Siri from the ground up, and has postponed the rollout several times. For a company that has sold over two billion devices, this is a serious problem. The assistant is the most obvious place where modern AI would become visible on an iPhone.

The path from word to alarm clock

Siri works in several steps. First, the device converts the sound waves of your voice into text. This step is called speech recognition. The system then tries to figure out what you actually want, meaning what intent lies behind the sentence. “Alarm at seven” and “wake me up tomorrow morning” are meant to trigger the same action.

Once the intent is recognized, Siri calls up the appropriate function: the clock app, the messages app, the music service. Finally, an artificially generated voice replies. Part of this runs directly on the device, another part on Apple’s servers on the internet. That’s why some commands work without a network connection and others don’t.

It’s important to distinguish this from a chatbot. Classically, Siri works with fixed mappings: a recognized intent leads to a predetermined action. A language model like the one behind ChatGPT, on the other hand, generates its answer word by word from scratch, making it more flexible but also less reliable. Apple is currently rebuilding Siri toward this more flexible technology, without losing reliability on simple commands.

Siri in everyday life and in the headlines

In everyday life, you mostly encounter Siri in passing. While driving, you dictate a message; in the kitchen, you set a timer; on the go, you ask for directions. The subtitle function and reading messages aloud through headphones also run through it. Many users use Siri almost exclusively for this handful of routine tasks.

Siri shows up in the news for two reasons. First, there’s the technical gap behind Google and OpenAI, along with rumors of partnerships and acquisitions. Second, there’s data privacy: in 2019, it became known that external contractors were listening to users' voice recordings, some of which had been triggered accidentally. Apple apologized and later paid a multimillion-dollar sum in a US settlement.

A common misconception is that Siri constantly listens to everything. In fact, the device only listens for the activation word and only sends data afterward. False triggers do happen, though, when a similar-sounding word is spoken. Anyone who wants to know how far AI on everyday devices has really come will find Siri a good gauge.