The relentless spate of advertising for Apple Intelligence is writing cheques that Siri can’t cash.

Of course we don’t have the whole feature set of Apple Intelligence yet (or at all here in the EU), because it’s being rolled out as a public beta. This move looks like an own goal for Apple, because it leads people to try to use the new features long before they are ready for prime time. Instead of being surprised and delighted, they end up encountering Siri in its current borderline unusable state.

There is something fundamentally broken in how it gets something into whatever passes for its head, and then just will not be persuaded to re-evaluate. Here is, as well as I can remember, a conversation between the Son&Heir, Siri, and me, as I was driving him to some activity or other. He was excited about the new album from Tyler, the Creator, so we thought we would listen to a couple of tracks during our drive.

Chromakopia cover

I hit the little voice control button on my car’s steering wheel, and so began our descent into madness.

Play Chromakopia by Tyler, the Creator

plays “I Follow Rivers (Tyler, the Creator Remix)” by Lykke Li1

Okay, weird, that doesn’t sound much like what I asked for, but at least it got the artist right. Maybe if I add some specificity?

Play album Chromakopia by Tyler, the Creator

plays “I Follow Rivers (Tyler, the Creator remix)” by Lykke Li

The Son&Heir is now getting frustrated, and contributes this suggestion for a specific track from the album:

Play song “Darling, I” by Tyler, the Creator

relentlessly plays “I Follow Rivers (Tyler, the Creator remix)” by Lykke Li

At this point we are rolling with laughter (it’s that or throw the phone out the window.) Eventually I had a brainwave and asked it this:

Play the new album from Tyler, the Creator

This, finally, did the trick.

But if this is what Siri is like — and presumably Apple knows as well as us the level of “customer sat” it is facing — why draw attention to it in the first place by involving Siri in the big Apple Intelligence push? Stick to the summarisation and the rewriting and so on,2 but keep Siri safely behind the scenes until it gets good, or at least better.

🖼️  The Chromakopia album cover is extracted from Spotify, because apparently the image is some sort of great secret that nobody is allowed to publish without cropping or watermarking or other nonsense?

  1. Not a bad track, just not at all what I asked for, nor even an understandable mistake: the album is not in my library, nor had I listened to it recently. ↩

  2. Not that I want those either, mind. ↩