This week on the Solid State Podcast, we mix everyone’s “favorite” digital assistant with everyone’s… umm… “favorite” emerging technology and get… literally the best version of it we’ve seen yet? 

Genuinely dear listener, I’m as shocked as you are. My struggles with all-things-Siri through the years have been well documented on not one but two different podcasts for over a decade, and the hilarious part is, if you could dig up some of those ancient episodes you’d find the problems then were, well, basically identical to the problems that persist just a week ago. Say exactly the right thing, exactly the right way, in exactly the right tone and… “magic” would happen… Deviate from that proven path one percent, and somehow I turned on the porch lights at my moms house when all I wanted to do was set a freakin timer…

But then, last week, at WWDC Apple did… exactly what we all expected them to do. AI, ahem, I mean “Apple Intelligence”… took the main stage in a very real way. Plugged into dear old Siri and you get… yep, you guessed it… Siri AI……

That part, again, wasn’t all that interesting. We’ve seen it coming for nearly a year. The Google / Gemini partnership was well documented. The things we needed it to do… already exist, yeah, on Gemini. 

No, where things really get interesting is… just days later as the phones and devices started cooling down from the somethings 30GB beta update… it all (okay, mostly)… works……

Does it death spiral and spin until a crash sometimes? Of course. Can it do my laundry for me? Not any better than Samsung’s million dollar robots can. Does Siri actually do a half-decent job of seeming to understand what I’m asking, what I need, and actually be able to “do the thing”? A shocking amount of the time…

I’m not about to say it was “worth the wait”, the jury is still very much out on that one. But is a promise dating back nearly 15 years on the verge of being realized? Let’s find out…