In March 2018, I compared the original 2010 demo of Siri against the then-current shipping version. That was eight years ago — closer, in fact, to the launch of the iPhone 4S and Apple’s version of Siri than to today.
Not much changed after I did that little experiment until Monday, when Apple announced a “profoundly more capable” Siri. Called Siri A.I., it will officially launch in beta with this year’s operating system upgrades. But I recently got access to the first preview of it in the first developer build of iOS 27 and, naturally, I had to try the same set of queries.
“I’d like a romantic place for Italian food near my office”: Apple’s previous Siri implementation always — for me, at least — got tripped up by the “near my office” part. New Siri did this flawlessly.
“I’d like a table for two at Il Fornaio in San Jose tomorrow night at 7:30”: Outside attempting this demo in 2018 and again today, I have never tried to book a restaurant reservation using Siri, so my sample size is pretty small. Last itme I did this, I once managed to get Siri to prompt me to make a reservation through OpenTable, but was otherwise greeted by an error.
New Siri did one of two things: on some attempts, it told me it could not book a table for me, but suggested I could add it to my calendar or call the restaurant to complete the reservation. On others, it added the event to my calendar and asked if I wanted Siri to call the restaurant to complete the reservation. It is interesting to me that Siri A.I. does not (yet?) throw to OpenTable, and only suggests I make an old-fashioned phone call.
“Where can I see Avatar in 3D IMAX?” I swapped “Avatar” for a current 3D IMAX movie, and Siri A.I. showed me one theatre locally that is showing it in 3D but not IMAX, and one that is only showing it in 2D IMAX. This is, I think, mostly fine. I think Siri should clarify that no theatre nearby is showing it in 3D IMAX, but I think this is preferable to showing me the nearest theatre matching the query literally. As with the restaurant example above, there is no way for me to buy tickets through Siri.
“What’s happening this weekend around here?”: In the original Siri demo, this only showed nearby public events for the weekend. Apple’s version, in 2018, thought I was asking about the news and then, after rephrasing twice, threw to a web search.
Siri A.I. interprets this differently than either. It showed me my calendar and the events I already have this weekend, and then found an event in a marketing email in my inbox “if you’re looking for something else to do”. There were no details presented beyond “a ticketed show” and no obvious followup, but after a followup question — “what is that event?” — it showed me more information and a button to open the message.
In the original Siri demo, they ask a followup question “how about San Francisco?”, so I did the same, and it showed me events happening there this weekend. Just what you would expect.
“Take me drunk I’m home”: Siri got me driving directions to my house.
Though this is a test conducted on the very first version of Siri A.I. from a fixed point in Calgary, it seems to work quite well. So far, it is better than any version of Siri Apple has released yet and, as you can see above, it is almost as good as the original 2010 demo, before Apple acquired the company.