We all know Siri as the voice-enabled virtual helper that lives inside your iPhone. But in the future, Siri could be much more than just a way to manage your Apple devices hands-free. It could evolve into the connective tissue between Apple’s future products, from smart glasses to home displays, potentially determining whether Apple can make another hit as meaningful as the iPhone.
Voice-controlled gadgets are nothing new; Siri has been available on the iPhone for 13 years, and both Amazon and Google managed to make the act of barking commands at home appliances a practical shortcut rather than a futuristic (and perhaps a little silly) concept.
But if anything has become evident over the last two years, it’s that generative AI — or AI that can create content and provide conversational responses based on training data — is pushing virtual helpers into their next era. Now that voice assistants are getting better at reasoning over voice, images and text, they may evolve into conversational interfaces rather than just question-and-answer bots.
So what does that mean for Siri? There’s a belief that as generative AI advances, the interfaces across the phones, laptops and tablets we use every day will become more voice-forward and less touch-centric, potentially resulting in new types of devices altogether. That means Siri could end up being the key touchpoint across Apple’s products moving forward, making Siri’s growth all the more crucial. It’s not just about keeping up with OpenAI and Google; Siri’s future growth could have a bigger impact than ever on how Apple’s future products are received.
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Siri could be at the center of Apple’s upcoming devices
Pictured: Meta Ray-Ban glasses (left) and Apple Vision Pro (right). If Apple ever releases a pair of smart glasses like the Meta Ray-Bans, Siri will likely be a big part of it.
Siri is a big part of Apple Intelligence, Apple’s push to infuse its iPhones, iPads and Macs with more AI features. For example, Siri will get better at using personal context stored on your phone to answer questions that are highly individualized, such as being able to take action based on content on your phone’s screen (similar to what Google’s Gemini assistant can already do on Android). Siri also has new knowledge about Apple’s products, meaning you can ask it for tech support.
But new AI features for phones, including Apple Intelligence and other similar Android-based services, don’t feel monumentally different or meaningful yet. For the iPhone, I think Siri could be the key to changing that. The biggest promise for AI on our phones, in my view, is having an assistant that can make better sense of all the data, photos, videos, apps and notifications stored on our devices to present us with relevant information as we need it. While only Apple knows what’s in store for the future of Apple Intelligence, the company’s current approach indicates Siri could move in that direction.
But Apple Intelligence is just the beginning. Apple is reportedly working on a class of new devices that will likely rely more heavily on voice input, such as smart glasses and a wall-mounted smart home display, according to Bloomberg. Apple is reportedly evaluating the smart glasses category in a bid to potentially compete with Meta’s Ray-Ban spectacles, which can answer questions based on what the wearer is looking at.
If Apple were to release a similar alternative, it’s hard to imagine Siri not playing a huge role in the device’s functionality. The quality of Siri’s answers would undoubtedly have a big impact on how useful a pair of Apple smart glasses would be.
Then there’s the other area Apple is said to be exploring: Smart home devices. The company is said to be developing a wall-mounted display powered by Siri and Apple Intelligence that would be used to manage home devices, control apps and make FaceTime calls, according to Bloomberg. While the device could run on software that resembles a combination of the iPhone’s StandBy mode and the Apple Watch’s WatchOS interface, it’ll primarily be designed for voice interactions, says the report. That alone suggests Siri will have a starring role in the device.
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Why these new products would be so important
Siri could play a major role in Apple’s future devices, if it ventures into new territories like smart glasses and smart displays.
The success of these new products is crucial for a couple of reasons. First, all eyes are on Apple’s AI ambitions as OpenAI and Google have hogged the spotlight in the AI race. And second, Apple’s wearables and digital services divisions have been critical in proving the company has new areas to grow that aren’t completely reliant on the iPhone, helping to satiate Wall Street when smartphone sales are in flux.
New devices like the ones Bloomberg says are in the pipeline could go a long way in growing both of those areas. Smart glasses, for example, could be seen as an evolution of AirPods in a sense, while the smart home display could bolster digital services like Apple Music.
It also wouldn’t be the first time Apple has developed a new gadget with Siri at the center. It launched the first HomePod smart speaker in 2018 as an answer to offerings from Amazon and Google, aiming to entice users with superior audio quality than those rivals offered at the time. But the HomePod failed to catch on in the same way, largely because Apple’s smart home platform and Siri were limited by comparison.
For the next wave of products, Apple will have to avoid making the same mistake. That’s why refining and extending Siri’s capabilities now, before it expands into new product categories, would be a smart move. Bloomberg reports that Apple is doing just that; the company is reportedly working on a more conversational version of Siri that can handle two-way verbal exchanges.
For Apple, the bar is particularly high. It’s not enough for products like Apple Intelligence, smart glasses or a smart home display to work well. It’s Apple’s ecosystem and the way hardware and software work together that makes an Apple product what it is, a point that Apple frequently acknowledges and takes pride in. If we truly are moving toward a world in which virtual assistants don’t just help you navigate the operating system but become the operating system, then Siri will become fundamental rather than supplemental.
