The wait for new Siri continues
November 4, 2025 at 4:25 PM by Dr. Drang
Yesterday, I drove to Champaign-Urbana for the Illinois men’s home basketball opener. Because I’m going to the CSO concert tonight, I stayed here overnight. When I started my car this morning, CarPlay connected to my phone and offered to give me directions home. Snort.
It’s common for CarPlay to do this when I’m away from home, and under most circumstances it’s a reasonable suggestion. A couple of years ago, when my wife was having day-long chemo infusions at the University of Chicago Medical Center, it was nice to have our rush hour route automatically plotted from Hyde Park home to Naperville. But I’m obviously not going home today until after the concert.
Should Siri know this? Well, the concert ticket is in my Wallet, the event (with location) is in my Calendar, and the email with a link to the ticket is archived somewhere in Mail. Last year’s Apple Intelligence ads would lead anyone—anyone who didn’t keep track of Siri’s actual capabilities, that is—to think that suggestions given by an Apple device would be precise and personalized. But even people who don’t follow Apple closely know that last year’s ads were lies.
We’re now hoping that Mark Gurman is right and a bespoke version of Google Gemini will be the savior of personalized Siri, giving us an assistant that’s aware of our calendar, contacts, and so on, but doesn’t transmit all our data to the don’t be evil empire in Mountain View.
Or maybe we shouldn’t bother. If Apple hadn’t made promises it couldn’t keep, today’s suggestion to drive home wouldn’t have struck me as funny. I’d be happy when suggestions like that are right and would dismiss them without a second thought when they’re wrong. It’s the hope that kills you.