Where Does Siri AI Even Work?

A lot of the reason that Siri being way smarter is lackluster for me is that I just don't use that many Apple services in any meaningful way. And the thing is: most people don't. Most people spend their workdays in Gmail, Slack, Teams, and Outlook, not iMessage or Calendar. There are certainly ways for people to get their calendars and emails into Apple's offerings, it's not like they're not supporting standards for email and calendar events, but that's not the whole problem either.

Difficulties In the Enterprise—My Use

One of the things that's difficult for me is that my job is based on very proprietary knowledge—the only place you can actually access some of this information is by having access to our internal docs and our internal MCP. I also deal with a lot of PHI (Protected Health Information) in my job, so basically nothing can leave my devices without very special care being taken. We've got connectors to Claude and ChatGPT that we can use for non-GDPR data in a secure manner, but Apple has nothing like that.

Outside the Enterprise—For Devs and Users

Outside of the enterprise, it's still difficult for people to actually interact with Siri AI. For one, app support is going to be entirely up to the developers on whether or not they build out for Siri's custom interactions with the apps. App Intents are not an MCP server and, even if you've built out a full MCP server and CLI for your app to interact with agents, you're going to have to do it all again—from scratch—to work on iPhone.

Apple's lack of support here is another kick in the crotch to developers (and to users) who want things to be accessible. There's a defined standard for this. MCP exists to connect agents to apps. Without implementing this in Siri, its integrations are going to be severely limited for users.

Other Agents Work Literally Everywhere

Look at this graph (cue Nickelback meme). Can you actually see where the macOS line is? It's following—and falling behind—the Linux line. Interestingly enough, though, OS X (versions of macOS from before 2016) is still going much stronger than macOS is. Safe to say, Macs still aren't that popular. This means most people aren't going to be able to use Siri on a desktop computer, making it much less useful for anything that people have actually found useful with AI agents, which is mostly in the workplace.

My ChatGPT subscription works everywhere. It works on my Windows laptop I'm typing on right now while pretending to work, it works on my Linux laptop sitting in front of me while I also pretend to work, but on that laptop, and it works on my iPhone sitting next to me. It's got connections to all of my tools from GitHub and Linear to Apple Health and Hevy. None of this works for Siri (save for the Apple Health integration).

Fixing the Problem

This problem's going to persist until developers put more support into their apps (IF developers put more support into their apps), but even then, it only gets you so far. Apple simply refuses to acknowledge that the web exists, which is where most productivity happens these days. Until Apple's willing to open up to that idea, Siri is always going to be limited to the people who are all in on iPad and iPhone. Mac users will see some benefit, but nowhere near the same kinds of benefits as most of the Mac is also on the web.

Ultimately, Siri AI cannot succeed until Apple relinquishes some control and opens its operating systems to make use of established standards like MCP, ACP, and—well—the open web. Otherwise, this is all going to continue to happen without them. We're all here on ATProto and ActivityPub, we know that the web is the future. It's time for Apple to realize that too.