Siri's getting shorter, and hopefully a whole lot smarter too

If you have an iPhone, an Apple Watch, a HomePod or other Apple kit, you've probably used Siri – and you've probably been a bit frustrated by it. Apple's personal digital assistant feels like it's been falling behind rival services, but that may change this week at WWDC. 

According to reports from Bloomberg and others, Apple is dropping the "Hey" bit of the "Hey, Siri" trigger. And more usefully, it's improving what Siri can do. 

What's coming to Siri in 2023?

Dropping the "hey" is an interesting one, because of all the Siri complaints I've read or heard I don't think anyone was unhappy about having to say "hey". Not only that, but dropping from a three-syllable trigger to two-syllable one may mean more false positives, and my Siri is already really bad for that. 

This change was first reported back in November, and at the same time Bloomberg reported that much deeper Siri integrations were coming in third party apps and that Siri's contextual understanding would be significantly improved. I'm hoping that Apple's engineers have been as focused on that as they have been on the trigger phrase, because of course a smarter Siri would be much more useful.

Given the hype around AI and large language models such as ChatGPT, I think it's highly likely we'll see a smarter Siri shown off this week – although I also think it's highly likely that the most useful things we'll see will be unavailable until iOS 17 and iPadOS 17 launch in late September.