WWDC 2024: Could Siri Finally Realize Its Full (AI) Potential?

WWDC is upon us, and it's time to see how Apple is going to spin its AI features in iOS 18 and macOS 15.

The World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) is where Apple details its plans for the next year of operating systems, from the Apple Watch up to the Vision Pro. And this year, all the rumors point to AI. Lots and lots of AI. Apple is the last of the big three OS vendors to detail its AI strategy, and we'll be watching to see if it avoids the huge mistakes made by Microsoft and Google. The thing is, Apple has already been doing AI for years, it just hasn't called it that. But can it successfully avoid the problems that have tripped up everyone else?

"Privacy, first and foremost. Any mistakes or slips on this and it would seriously affect my view and trust of Apple and my data," says Apple user Fuzzball84 in a MacRumors forum thread participated in by Lifewire. "If I'm honest, I feel nervous about this. I feel like they're just rushing into it, because everyone else is."

Not AI

Apple is historically quite conservative when it comes to new software features. For every huge hardware leap like Apple Silicon, there are things that take forever to arrive, like the home-screen widgets that Android had already enjoyed for years. But Apple's slow-and-steady approach usually ends well.

Instead of gold-rushing into AI like Google, with its pizza-glue debacle, or Microsoft's Recall privacy nightmare, expect Apple to use AI-based tech to add useful features to existing apps, just like it has been doing since forever.

Until now, Apple has called AI "machine learning," which is frankly a much more accurate name, because—as we have seen— AI tools are far from intelligent. Apple Silicon has had a built-in AI processor for years, too, the Neural Engine, designed to run AI fast, and totally on-device. We're used to the fancy new autocomplete, the slew of neat features in the Camera and Photos apps, Siri's app suggestions, and so on. We use AI every day to drag subject out of photos to make stickers, or to let our iPhones detect text in photos, and make it selectable, translatable, and searchable.

Expect much more of this. The rumors, of which there have been many, point to AI being used everywhere from the Notes app (audio transcriptions), Apple Music (AI-generated playlists), and the Health app.

Nowhere, though, have we read rumors of any kind of chatbot, or AI assistant, although that kind of functionality could come either to the Spotlight search feature, or in Siri. Speaking of which…

Siri, but Good

Siri is popularly regarded as the worst voice assistant of all, proving that no matter how much cash Apple has, it still cannot manage to make something better than Clippy, Microsoft's hated Office assistant from the pre-AI era. Putting AI into Siri could be the equivalent of pumping adrenaline into Jason Statham in Crank.

Apple has signed a deal with Open AI, the maker of Chat GPT and other large language model (LLM) AI tools, which will presumably have something to do with Siri getting better at answering questions. This is so desperately needed it's not even funny any more. Well, maybe a bit funny. By injecting some GPT power into Siri, it could immediately get better at understanding your requests, answering them more accurately, and remembering what you asked it like two seconds ago so you don't have to start over.

AI chatbots and search have rightly got a lot of bad press, and will likely never get much better, but in the case of Siri, even that would be an improvement.

Hopefully Apple will manage to stop Siri from convincing you to fall in love with it, or to divorce your partner, but who knows? Fortunately, it looks like all of iOS 18 and macOS 15's AI features may be opt-in, so that you won't have to use them, or be party to the waste of energy and the ethical problems AI causes.

Mac on the iPad

The iPad is also set for some exciting new features. Perhaps the best of these will be a new calculator app. Yes, finally, the iPad will have a built-in calculator.

But better than that is the possibility of the iPad being able to run macOS. This is a long shot bet, but it makes total sense given the power of the new M4 iPad Pro, and would shut up all the whiners (like me) who want the iPad to do more than just be a big iPhone.

"I think it would be a massive positive thing for a small number of users," UI designer Graham Bower told Lifewire via email. "You’d have to enable it, and that would be fine. People that want it [can] do it, and other people have no clue it’s even there. I think with a Magic Keyboard it would be an excellent user experience."

Wishful thinking? Maybe, but it's not without precedent. The iPad has been able to run blown-up iPhone apps since forever, despite it being a poor experience, and the Mac can already run iPad apps, which is equally poor. MacOS on the iPad would be better than both of these.

There are sundry other rumors about new features, but one of our favorites is the inclusion of RCS messaging, which is the successor to SMS. This would make it much better to chat with friends on Android phones, with better support for images, reactions, emojis, and so on.

Apple's 2024 OS updates look to be both huge and incremental. But we're really curious about how it will integrate AI into everything without ruining what's already there—if it can.