Forget Apple Intelligence, Siri doesn’t even know what month it is

It’s not Apple’s finest hour, as the company is going through one of the most humiliating periods of its recent history. Apple had to admit a few days ago that the smarter Siri it advertised as coming this year to iPhone via Apple Intelligence is delayed indefinitely. It’s unclear how long it’ll take for that Siri upgrade to come to iPhone 16 and other supported devices.

The realization that the smarter Siri in Apple Intelligence is just vaporware prompted plenty of backlash from Apple fans unhappy with how Apple handled the delay.

I said at the time that I still want the Siri vision Apple unveiled at WWDC 2024, but I want Apple to be honest about what it can and can’t do. Yes, Apple is well behind ChatGPT and Gemini, considering this massive setback, but it has time to catch up and deliver the product it advertised. Personal AI assistants are the future of computers, and Apple will eventually get there.

Now that we’re used to the idea of Apple Intelligence being a huge letdown, we can go back to using iPhones as if Apple Intelligence doesn’t exist. Without the smart Siri that should have been here, Apple Intelligence is really nothing to write home about. I’ll continue to ignore it, even though it’s finally available in Europe. It offers nothing I need right now.

However, it looks like Siri, available outside of Apple Intelligence, is somehow getting dumber. People have noticed the iPhone assistant can’t answer simple questions like “What month is it?” and that’s bad news for Apple.

Siri was the key iPhone 4s feature that Apple unveiled all the way back in 2011. That was nearly 15 years ago. It was extraordinary, teasing the sort of iPhone functionality that seemed taken out of a sci-fi movie. You could issue simple voice commands to the assistant, and Siri would provide assistance.

Since then, competitors have overtaken Siri’s capabilities, with Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Google Assistant being two good examples, despite Apple improving its own voice assistant.