There are once again rumors of another Siri revamp — something I’m strongly in favor of. In a world of ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, the current Siri experience feels like a fourth grader trying to defend a PhD dissertation.

I use AI for many things — as this blog is witness to. I write code with AI, research vacation plans, and automate menial tasks. Siri can’t do any of these — and I desperately want it to be a better tool for automation.

If you double tap your iPhone’s home bar, you’ll see a few quick actions that are dynamically displayed based on — waves hands — whatever Siri thinks you want to do. (For the record, I have never played a podcast in Apple’s Podcast app.) Sometimes there aren’t even three options because Siri can’t think of three ways to help you.

All I want is control over this experience. Let me write Skills that solve real problems I have. I want a Fix Spelling and Grammar skill that quickly cleans up my emails. I want a skill that answers questions about what I see on screen. I want a skill that summarizes podcasts to decide if they’re worth listening to. I want to do a lot of things — and many of them are hyper-specific to me. Since Apple loves AppIntents, maybe we can even throw these Skills into the framework and let developers expose them as Shortcuts.

Everyone will have a different set of skills they want to use — and that’s great! People should have flexibility and autonomy in how they interact with AI systems. It frustrates me that the only way to interact with AI at a system level on iOS and macOS is so tied to Siri — and Apple’s current lackluster vision for AI. It shouldn’t be so hard to automate a menial task on the most important computing device in my life.