Everyone has had more than their fair share of being frustrated at Siri. Apple brought the voice assistant feature to the masses by introducing Siri with the iPhone 4S in 2011, and it felt like it had never reached its full potential.

There have been a few upgrades to Siri in the past thirteen years, but nothing as significant as the Apple Intelligence updates that were promised in the 2024 WWDC keynote.

Apple Intelligence has been a hit and miss so far, and Apple is clever enough to still keep the “beta” tag associated with it. There have been a few features, and summarising notifications has been my favourite so far. But Siri has gotten a new makeover with a cool new animation too. The new, cool-looking glowing, colourful border effect that appears around the iPhone screen whenever Siri is active is the only change that happened to Siri. Apple hasn’t confirmed this, but it doesn’t take much to understand that Siri is still using the old model and not the new features “powered” by Apple Intelligence.

The new context-aware Siri features are coming out with iOS 18.4, and that is when we should and could judge Apple’s voice assistance based on what was promised at WWDC. Apple still uses the older and still poor version of the voice assistant. When you now ask Siri something the answers are still bad, but with a better-looking animation, leading people to assume the new Siri powered by Apple Intelligence is still as ineffective as the old Siri.

This is something that Apple brought upon themselves. Apple should have reserved the new colourful glowing animation for when the actual newer and better version of Siri ships. A lot of posts on Twitter, Threads, and Reddit highlight how Siri is still poor. If the animation hadn’t changed, the users would not have given it a try only to be disappointed. Users would have waited for the new Siri, but now this has led to dissatisfaction with Apple Intelligence overall.

The new Siri was meant to be its reawakening, but what we are left with is the same old system with a new coat of paint. I feel like enough damage is done already, and I can only hope that with iOS 18.4, Siri is good enough for people to actually give it a second, third, fourth one more chance.