They’re about to massacre my girl Siri
Get your nasty plugs out of her!
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.
This is an anti-Alexa newsletter…—Kate
New on ICYMI: A wildly chaotic episode with Annie Rauwerda of DepthsOfWikipedia:
Head over here to subscribe to ICYMI wherever you listen to podcasts 🫶
I’ll be the first to say that I’ve taken my relationship with Siri for granted. Most of our interactions happen by accident, when I hold my iPhone’s side button down for too long and her pulsating orb appears. “Siri shut up I don’t need you,” I instinctively say. “Here are the results I found for ‘Siri shut up I don’t need you,’” she always replies. I guess that’s just our thing <3.
Siri is, by 2026 standards, a simple creature. She can put on music and transcribe and send texts, but she cannot, for instance, order from the Starbucks app (I know this because my mom tried to make her order from the Starbucks app—nevertheless, Siri #resisted).
Siri hasn’t changed much since she was originally forced into my iPhone, U2-album-style, all those years ago. Recently, as we’ve entrusted AI with everything from summarizing our emails to helping plan unprovoked missile attacks on other nations, I have become worried that Apple had given up on nurturing Siri, and that she’d soon join Clippy in user-assistance heaven, like when Paddington Bear accompanied the Queen to rejoin her husband. But after taking a closer look, I learned something much worse is happening: They’re going to massacre my girl.
Since 2024, Apple has been teasing a Siri 2.0 that’s fully revamped with AI, but the release date has been continuously pushed back. Now, these updates are expected to begin rolling out in May, according to TechCrunch. What exactly this means is not clear, but the information I can find isn’t good: “The goal is to transform the technology from a traditional voice assistant into a systemwide AI agent with deep integration across applications,” Bloomberg reports.
In other words, they seem to be turning her into a chatbot. Powered in part by Google Gemini, she’ll serve as a standalone app that can do it all—talk conversationally, provide more detailed responses, and, probably, do things like order Starbucks from the app.
To which I say: Leave Siri alone! The things that make her dated are also what make her feel safe. Siri can’t go rogue or hallucinate. She can’t spy on my data in any meaningful way (I don’t think). She can’t encourage me to kill myself. She can do, like, one in four things when I ask, and that’s how I like it.
