Apple has finally released the long-awaited customized Siri with iOS 27. The company has kept its promises and delivered on the ambitious goals it set for itself in 2024.
That said, Siri still lacks in terms of proactively taking action for you, a feature that many AI companies are actively working on. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple may decide to do so next year. The company is also experimenting with a new design pipeline that could enable faster development.
In recent months, companies like Meta and SpaceXSI have gone all-in on new agentic AI interfaces that can perform tasks for you. Muse and Grok Bot are agents that have their own virtual machines and can proactively handle background tasks for you, then deliver results.
Apple has a lot of potential to offer in this space, especially considering all the frameworks it has created over the years, such as App Intents. With Apple, you hypothetically wouldn’t need to depend on your computer’s ability to use it, making some tasks much less expensive.
According to Mark Gurman in his Power On newsletter, Apple could debut its own proactive version of Siri as early as next year:
Dots, Muse, and Grok can track goals, determine what needs to happen next, and continue pursuing goals without the user initiating every single step. Apple ultimately wants to go in this direction, I’m told, and I think the company could make Siri more agent-like as early as next year, not that it has much of a choice, given current consumer and market demands.
It remains to be seen what Apple will ultimately offer here, but with the right execution, Apple certainly has high potential to compete in this space.
Apple improves internal development processes for iOS 28
An important part of better execution is having a better process. According to Gurman, Apple is also giving engineers more time to code and explore, rather than spending as much time integrating features into the operating system.
Typically, each of these phases lasts four weeks. With the first iOS 28 development cycle, Apple spends 6 weeks on coding and 2 weeks on integration. This change has likely been driven by massive advances in agent-based coding tools over the past couple of years:
For this cycle, however, Apple has done things differently for the M1 milestone. Instead of the normal split into two four-week efforts, Apple engineers were tasked with six weeks of coding, exploration, and feature development, and then just two weeks of convergence. Employees say they appreciate the change, indicating that it creates more time to come up with ideas and explore them before having to nail down things.
My favorite Apple accessory recommendations:
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