WWDC 2026 - Siri AI Impressions!

Apple has just wrapped up possibly the most important WWDC they've ever had. It's Tim Cook's last dance before stepping down as CEO. So, we got our final good morning. And even more importantly, after 2 years of Apple convincing us that their phones are about to become supercharged with AI and then a $250 million lawsuit for underdelivering, today was the event where they had to prove that actually Apple Intelligence and their nextg Siri called Siri AI is the real deal. And they've definitely got the design right. It all looks beautiful, but there's also some question marks around functionality and a couple of bits that just felt straight up tonedeaf to me. We'll get to that. So, given the absolutely enormous stakes of this event, I found it pretty hilarious that Apple kicked things off by talking about the corner radius on their windows within your Mac. Every window on Mac OS now has the same tighter corner radius. Finally, they answered my prayers. The big picture though, aside from all the AI stuff, is this year's software is all about optimization across all of their products. Seems like Apple realized after a year of squinting at their icons that the transparency of liquid glass was probably set a bit high by default. So, they've toned it down. And since no one seems to agree on what the correct amount of transparency actually is, they've gone fine, we'll do it yourselves and given us a slider. So, depending on how brave you're feeling, you can decide to either dial it up from there or down. This is very clearly the year of Apple fixing their back end. They do this every now and again. And these are often the less exciting updates, but the ones that actually end up mattering more. Like for example, they're saying that now everything is just going to be faster. They threw out a whole load of numbers. Like for example, iPhone apps now load up to 30% faster. After shooting photos, those photos appear in your gallery up to 70% faster. Airdrops are up to 80% faster. And because your devices are also about to get much better at properly indexing files, you'll also be able to search through them quicker. Bear in mind those up twos, though. Nothing they've announced is actually going to feel as transformative as they're making it sound. But I do like the idea of things getting faster. There are also a ton of other smaller changes. You could just pause here if you fancy a very long read. And then just before the big new Apple Intelligence and Siri, Apple took a surprise segue into child protection features, which I now have extra reason to care about. Now, the idea is really to give parents complete control over what their kids can see and do. So, anytime your kid wants to download a new app, you get a ping. You can see it and you can decide to approve it. Anytime they visit a new website for the first time or even talk to a new contact, you can see it and approve it, which I guess is kind of a double-edged blade cuz it's got the safety benefits, making sure that they're not talking to people they shouldn't be, but also partly just the over stimulation stuff. It means that you can start your kids off with just a tiny number of apps when they're young and then let them unlock more as they get older. Or you can just let them use school related apps during the school day and then schedule the entertainment apps to only unlock in the evening. Now whether or not this is in response to governments demanding better child protection or just Apple seeing the massive potential upside in getting kids locked into their ecosystem before they're old enough to even make a choice. These are really good features that it's kind of sad to say, but they're needed now given how capable and open the tech has become. But now it's time to address the elephant. Siri AI. They opened this whole thing up by saying, "We know there are times when you expect more from Siri." Yeah, I think that's uh quite the understatement. The first time Apple announced a new Siri in 2024 with this brand new disco lights animation, which ended up as the main feature, Siri was so halfbaked that if you bought an iPhone because of it, Apple literally owes you up to $95. So, I'm relieved to say that the new Siri AI is a huge jump. So, it's got a fresh look. It's got this subtler, toned down, more liquid, glassy aesthetic. potentially a little personality lossless, but premium for sure, and it now lives inside your dynamic island. So, in terms of capability, this is not breaking any new ground. It's not a secret that Apple's paying Google a billion dollars a year to use Gemini as its foundation. So, it's not a surprise that pretty much everything this new Siri can do is something we've already seen Gemini do. But that still makes it a musive leap over the old series. So, they gave a bunch of real-time examples in their keynote like how you can have continued conversations with it. You can ask when a band is performing and then ask how you can get tickets. They showed how Siri now has screen awareness so you can just be looking at a photo and then ask where is this exactly without needing to spell out what you're looking at. It has personal context. So Siri has access to all your past messages, your photos, and because your files are now indexed more thoroughly, they're saying that Siri is really good at pulling those things up at just the right times when you ask Siri about things related to them. Bear in mind though, this isn't a live event. So while they are showing what appear to be realtime examples, how many times did they test those real-time examples till they worked out just perfectly? I would guess more than once. Here's the good news, though. While the capability of Siri AI is, I would say not surprising, I think the implementation kind of is. Best moment of the entire keynote was watching this guy having a full-on eargasm listening to Siri's improved voice quality. Why has no one told me? I'm telling you, man. I've been changed. Clear the fridge. No, clear all the fridges on it, Jaws. Which is also actually configurable. Now, this is a seriously cool user interface to be able to change the pace and expressivity of your assistant to your exact preferences. I love how they've made this software actually feel like part of the hardware. The way that all of these Siri pop-ups blend seamlessly into the physical camera cutout you have on your phone. Put it this way, I can't think of an assistant that looks as smoothly integrated as this. And I guess with all the time that Apple saved not having to worry about what it does, cuz that's kind of Google's problem now, they've instead spent it optimizing how to make it as intuitive as possible. It just makes sense how Siri lives at the top and then you pull down to talk to it and then pull down again to just fluidly enter the new dedicated Siri app. This is where you can full screen your current conversation, but also where the rest of your chats are stored and synced across all of your other Apple devices. But maybe the highlight of this entire section was shortcuts. You can now use your natural voice to describe a shortcut that you want to create. The example they gave was let my partner know automatically every time I leave work and give them an ETA based on real time map data. And that's it. All of the clunkiness and complexity of actually having to build the shortcut yourself is gone. which is such a good use of AI because it takes one of the best possible features of the iPhone and changes it from something that 10% of people at most will even dare to fiddle with to all of a sudden something that my grandma would happily use. Now, as part of this overhaul, Apple's also upgraded that weird visual intelligence feature that I'm sure all of you used because now it's powered by the new Siri AI and integrated into the camera app itself. There's some good ideas here, like you can scan a plate of food to get nutritional insights, or scan a bill and then your phone can automatically split that bill up and send people money requests using Apple Cash. Way to make your Android friends feel even more out of it. I like the integration. It makes sense to fuse visual intelligence with the camera app that everyone's already using. And it's great that each scan you do automatically saves to your Siri app so that you can come back to it. But whether or not I actually use this is going to rest entirely on how reliable it is. Like if I'm on holiday and I'm trying to translate the ingredients on a trail mix to check if it contains peanuts, which I am deathly allergic to, I'm not going to use this over Google Lens just because it has prettier animations. It's all about the result. Now, bear in mind this whole upgraded Siri AI, it's not just a phone thing. It's coming to all Apple product lines. So, the Apple Watch gets it, which is really useful because that's an even faster way to get to it than the phone. The Vision Pro gets it in the form of this floating 3D blob, which you can just look at and start speaking. And what I thought was pretty impressive is that it can understand not just the Safari tabs and the windows that you have open, but also the real objects in the real room in front of you at the same time. And the Mac gets it, but to me at least, that's the least useful one. They showed a bunch of things that you can do with this new Siri, like how it's integrated into the Mac's normal spotlight search, how you can highlight files and then ask Siri questions about them, like can you compare the contents of them, or how you can highlight text or even images and it can extract the data from them to add to your calendar really quickly. But honestly, nothing they showed for the Mac really excited me. I think the difference is unlike an Apple Watch, when I'm on my Mac, I already have access to all of the best tools that exist. And in that environment, I can't imagine using a lot of Siri, which feels caught up to some of the competition, but certainly not a bleeding edge tool. And then finally, for this event, Apple introduced the next generation of Apple Intelligence. I feel like this contained both the highlights of the entire event as well as the low points. So, Safari can now automatically organize your tabs into topics based on what it sees, which is an interesting idea, but personally to me looks just as confusing to navigate as leaving it as is and having a ton of tabs. But being able to describe an extension to Safari and just let it build it, that's cool. Like, for example, a tool that lets you save recipes easily. Your iPhone can now automatically upgrade your weak passwords. And that's wild cuz that's not your phone just telling you they're weak. It's essentially your phone logging into these sites on your behalf, deciding what that password should be, and then executing that entire process. It also strikes me as an extremely good way of locking people further into Apple. Like, what's my password for Spotify? I have no idea, but my iPhone knows. Apple's now got a very similar feature to Google's magic cue, where the AI is kind of trying to anticipate your needs. So, if someone messages you about your recent trip together, it can pull up all the photos related to that trip. Or if someone emails about an upcoming dinner reservation, you can get this little option to add it immediately to your calendar. If you're on a phone call to say an airline, your phone can retrieve any relevant confirmation codes from your mail app. And I do trust that Apple is going to integrate this seamlessly. But what isn't as clear is if it's all then going to fall apart if you use Gmail or Google Calendar. One of the standouts was in the Apple Home app. They're saying that if you use a compatible home security camera, then your phone can use its new AI to scan through the live feeds and summarize all the notable events while breaking up the clips into separated segments. There's a couple of instances where this feature alone would have saved me hours. And possibly the most important announcement of the entire event, a major boost in accuracy of spelling, punctuation, and dictation. So, Apple's saying that anything you now type or speak into your Apple devices when they get the new updates will be a lot more accurate. This is a billion times more useful than like AI features that try to write for you. I just want to write like me, but correct. It means Siri's going to better understand you. Your reminders will actually pick up what you mean. You can actually send intelligible messages when handsfree on CarPlay. But then they showed the new image editing tools and it just got very uncomfortable. So image playground got a big update too. You know that image generation tool that everyone used all the time to make to make I don't really know to be honest but it generates slop in higher quality now. They gave an example of how you can now use someone's face to make an invite for an event. But I was just so surprised for a company that's usually so deliberate that no one questioned how horrifying and soulless this end result was. Apple Intelligence can generate contact posters and lock screen wallpapers, but it still has that mid-tier AI creepy, not quite photorealistic feel to it. They've updated the photo cleanup to be able to better scrub out photo bombers from your images. And I will not complain about that. I mean, for the last 2 years, ironically, for a feature called cleanup, it sure has been quite the mess. There's an extend tool, so you can expand images beyond their original frame, and it'll use AI to fill in the blanks. And even spatial reframing, where using AI, you can touch and drag an image to change the angle that the photo was taken from. And on one hand, this was absolutely an impressive tech demo of what's possible. But on the other hand, I just kind of hate this whole idea of you've already got a perfectly fine photo there of your two real children. Why would you turn that into a fake AI image that never happened just to make the angle more aesthetic? Overall, I feel like Apple's AI has gone from very behind to good enough. This isn't class leading, but it will feel like a big jump in your experience if all you use is Apple products and you were happy before. Anyway, there's just a couple of important caveats. First, that while it's great that they're updating even phones as old as the iPhone 11 to the new iOS 27, they're also saying that the most powerful version of Siri that they showed us, and that's kind of the main upgrade they talked about, that's only coming to the very latest products. So for iPhone, that's literally only the Air and the 17 Pros. Not even the base iPhone 17. And with the iPad and Max, you get a little more leeway, but not a lot. And then also the fact that Apple's being a bit ky here about what you actually get for free. They've said some Apple Intelligence features, including image generation, have daily usage limits because they rely on powerful server models. Increased access is available with most iCloud Plus subscription plans. Feels a bit like trying to sweep the biggest question mark people have under the rug as if it's some sort of footnote. But time will tell. If you've been thinking, by the way, since that last video, Aaron, your phone is looking mighty clean today. Yeah, since realizing that I am truly stuck on the iPhone, I decided to just get rid of every single icon I didn't need, every app I didn't need, every notification I didn't need. And one of the best ways of doing that is just getting everything about you off the internet. You could try and do that yourself. I've been using incogn sponsor because it does it all for you. It'll email data brokers, the ones who collect your addresses, phone numbers, and try to sell them, and then exercise your right to claim that data back. And you should be able to notice actually getting less spam and scam calls cuz criminals often use that sold data to target people. Oh, and you can use the code boss below to get literally 60% off an annual plan with the family plan being like silly good