In 2010, a start-up called Siri, a “personal assistant for your phone,” shared a demo of its new app powered by artificial intelligence. “I’d like a table for two at Il Fornaio in San Jose tomorrow night at 7:30,” a voice said before Siri booked it. It helped plan a big night out, adding a movie to the itinerary. It interpreted the message “take me drunk I’m home” as a request for a taxi, which it suggested it could call. A year later, after Siri was absorbed into Apple, executive Scott Forstall would show off a similar sequence, now integrated into the iPhone. He was looking for “great Greek restaurants in Palo Alto,” but the pitch was basically the same: Voice assistants are here, and they can do things for you. “I’ve been in the AI field for a long time, and this still blows me away,” he said.

In hindsight, Forstall got carried away. Siri couldn’t do much at launch and can’t do that much more today. In the hands of regular people on actual iPhones, this “personal assistant” spent most of the next 15 years, like its cousin Alexa, setting timers and reminders, checking the weather, and reading notifications. In 2024, after the explosion of ChatGPT, Apple announced it would relaunch Siri alongside a new set of systems called Apple Intelligence; just last month, the company settled a........

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