We’re about to enter the Apple Intelligence era, and it promises to dramatically change how we use our Apple devices. Most importantly, adding Apple Intelligence to Siri promises to resolve many frustrating problems with Apple’s “intelligent” assistant. A smarter, more conversational Siri is probably worth the price of admission all on its own.
But there’s a problem.
The new, intelligent Siri will only work (at least for a while) on a select number of Apple devices: iPhone 15 Pro and later, Apple silicon Macs, and M1 or better iPads. Your older devices will not be able to provide you with a smarter Siri. Some of Apple’s products that rely on Siri the most–the Apple TV, HomePods, and Apple Watch–are unlikely to have the hardware to support Apple Intelligence for a long, long time. They’ll all be stuck using the older, dumber Siri.
This means that we’re about to enter an age of Siri fragmentation, where saying that magic activation word may yield dramatically different results depending on what device answers the call. Fortunately, there are some ways that Apple might mitigate things so that it’s not so bad.
Making Requests Personal
While Apple Intelligence will mean that tomorrow’s Siri will be able to consult a detailed semantic index of your information in order to intelligently process your requests, even today’s dumber Siri uses information on your device to perform tasks. That’s a problem for a device like the HomePod, which isn’t your phone, doesn’t run apps, and has a very limited knowledge of your personal status.
To work around this, Apple created a feature called Personal Requests, which lets you connect your HomePod (and personal voice recognition!) to an iPhone or iPad. When you make a request to Siri on the HomePod that requires data from your iPhone, the HomePod seamlessly processes that request on your more capable device and then gives you the answer.
This sounds like a potential pathway for a workaround to allow Apple devices that can’t support Apple Intelligence to still take advantage of it. Of course, it would increase latency somewhat, but if you’ve got an Apple Intelligence-capable iPhone or iPad nearby, it could potentially make your HomePods much more useful. The same approach could work with an Apple Watch and its paired iPhone. (I can also imagine a future, high-end version of the Apple TV that would be able to execute Apple Intelligence requests and be an in-home hub to handle requests made by lesser devices.)
No, it’s not as ideal as having your device process things itself, but it’s better than the alternative, which is Siri fragmentation.