Once again, Apple's WWDC is just around the corner. For Apple, the most important thing is not just the farewell speech by 'old leader' Tim Cook, but the urgent need to answer the world's expectations for 'AI'.
Apple must confront its most embarrassing question of the past three years—why does the world's most expensive smartphone come with the dumbest AI assistant?
On May 28th local time, ten days before the event, foreign media provided a glimpse of the answer.
Reportedly, the scale of this Siri revamp is unprecedented since Siri's debut with the iPhone 4S in 2011. The new interface adopts a dark color scheme, is rebuilt with a chatbot interaction paradigm, and is deeply integrated with the Dynamic Island.
More crucially, Apple will allow users to directly 'plug in' Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude into the Siri experience—Siri is set to become a distribution platform for AI models.
Everyone will wonder, what will Siri infused with AI actually look like?
01. A Complete Interface Overhaul
According to a Bloomberg report, the new version of Siri has several core changes. Looking at them together reveals Apple's complete logic.
Possible Siri and Dynamic Island fusion interaction | Image source: Instagram
The first is a complete interface rebuild. A chatbot-style interaction interface, dark color scheme, Dynamic Island integration—Siri transforms from a 'pop-up layer' into an independent application experience entry point. This is more than a visual upgrade; it importantly implies that Apple wants users to treat Siri as a tool they 'actively use', not a voice command line occasionally summoned.
The second is conversational persistence. For years, one of the biggest pain points of talking to Siri was its lack of memory. Every wake-up started from zero—no context, no continuity. The new Siri reportedly fixes this issue—it sounds like a small thing, but it's the foundational condition for the 'assistant' feeling to be valid.
The third, and most noteworthy, is the 'Extensions framework'—allowing third-party AI models to plug into Siri.
The deeper implication of this design is that Apple is no longer taking 'building the best AI model' as its sole path, but rather repositioning iOS as 'the platform for the best AI models to compete'. Just as the App Store doesn't require Apple to develop all apps itself, the new Siri ecosystem doesn't need Apple to outperform everyone in model capabilities—it just needs to bring in all the models and retain users through system-level integration.
Put simply, Apple is fighting the 'model' war with a 'platform' logic.
02. Siri's Three Years of Debt
To understand the weight of this revamp, one must first understand how passive Apple has been in recent years.
In 2023, ChatGPT burst onto the scene, redefining 'conversational AI'. In 2024, Google embedded Gemini into Android, and Samsung turned AI features into selling points. The entire industry accelerated at a breakneck pace, and what was Siri doing? It was still misunderstanding user commands, still interpreting 'set an alarm for 8 AM tomorrow' as opening the alarm app.
Apple, of course, hasn't been idle. At WWDC 2024, Apple Intelligence debuted with great fanfare, promising a host of deeply integrated AI features. But the reality is that many features were either delayed, available only in specific regions, or their actual experience fell far short of the on-stage demos. A long-time Apple tech analyst bluntly stated, 'This doesn't feel like a finished comeback; it feels more like Apple finally arrived at the AI race—only to find itself still in mid-development.'
After three years of accumulated disparity, Apple desperately needs a true turnaround victory.
Two days ago, Apple quietly launched the subdomain genai.apple.com. This small move created significant ripples in tech circles—many interpreted it as a signal that Apple is making final public relations preparations for this WWDC's 'AI transformation'.
03. The Must-Answer Conundrum
But there is a paradox here, already being discussed by many media outlets.
One of Apple's long-standing core moats is privacy. 'Your data is processed only on your device' is Apple's core promise to users and the reason for architectures like Private Cloud Compute.
Now, to make Siri more powerful, Apple is planning to introduce Google's infrastructure to handle some AI queries.
This isn't a technical problem; it's a trust problem.
Possible Siri Q&A interface | Image source: Instagram
When Apple personally breaks the red line of 'only using its own computing infrastructure', its privacy promise to users is no longer absolute. Users can, of course, choose not to use the Google Gemini integration, but 'can choose not to use' and 'doesn't touch by default' are two entirely different things. How Apple explains this shift to users during the keynote will be one of the most-watched details on June 8th.
Furthermore, there's an even more fundamental question. A user on Reddit asked a simple but pointed question—if the Claude inside Siri offers the same experience as using Claude directly, why would I use a shelled version?
Apple must provide a compelling answer, and currently, there seems to be only one candidate—system-level integration: an AI that can access contacts, calendar, photos, health data is a completely different experience from an AI that runs in isolation.
This is Apple's last and most important bargaining chip.
While there is much criticism of Apple's AI pace, a counter-narrative is also circulating—maybe Apple is slow because it's waiting for others to step on the landmines first.
Over the past two years, OpenAI, Google, and Meta have invested hundreds of billions of dollars in data centers, chips, and model training, raising concerns about an AI bubble. In contrast, Apple's strategy seems to be: don't rush to build the 'strongest model', but once the track stabilizes, use its core strength of 'system integration' to catch up from behind.
To some extent, the iOS 27 layout is fulfilling this logic. Don't compete head-on in model capability, but bring in both Gemini and Claude, then build differentiated experience moats using capabilities Android cannot replicate, like the Dynamic Island, personal data permissions, and on-device processing.
This isn't a hasty catch-up by a laggard; it's a calculated bet.
The bet is: the endgame of AI is not about whose model is strongest, but whose system uses models most seamlessly.
On June 8th, Apple will present its complete answer. Whether Siri can truly impress users already accustomed to ChatGPT and Gemini will be the real test of this high-stakes gamble.
Fifteen years later, Siri owes its users an explanation.
*Cover image source: Instagram
This article is from the WeChat public account "GeekPark" (ID: geekpark), author: Hua Lin Wu Wang
