After two years and a $250 million lawsuit, Apple’s long-awaited AI-powered overhaul of Siri is finally making its way to iPhones, Macs, and even the Apple Vision Pro—for the handful of people who actually use it. During Monday’s WWDC keynote, the company shared a wave of new details about these updates, which are designed to take full advantage of hardware that Apple claims is “built for Apple Intelligence.”

To be honest, I’m not easily impressed by AI when it comes to daily use. I still don’t trust large language models to deliver consistently reliable information, I find it ethically questionable—and frankly uncool—to use AI for writing, and I don’t have any burning desire to see myself as a Studio Ghibli character. But every now and then, AI’s potential does tempt me. That was exactly how I felt watching Apple’s Siri AI demos. They paint a picture of a world where your phone comes with an always-on, constantly working assistant that knows everything about you and can help you keep up with conversations across a dozen different apps at once. To borrow from Katy Perry, it feels so wrong—what about the privacy implications?—but it also feels so right. I’m overwhelmed by my phone, and I’m desperate for help sorting through it all. I want Siri to be my own personal Emily from *The Devil Wears Prada*—a “second brain” that anticipates my needs before I even realize them. I want Siri to read my texts and automatically create an event when a friend and I decide to grab dinner on Thursday. I want Siri to remind me, as I walk past CVS, that I have a prescription ready. If I forget to reply to an important work email, I want Siri to nudge me.

Siri AI won’t deliver all of that right out of the gate, but it’s heading in the right direction. At WWDC, Justin Titi, Apple’s Senior Director of AI Engineering, demonstrated a simple but powerful example: he asked Siri to remind him of the dessert his daughter mentioned recently. Siri searched across his phone and found a text from about a month ago where his daughter said she wanted to make coconut cookies. It’s a small thing, but asking Siri to find that message saves the hassle of scrolling through an entire month of conversation. The revamped Siri is designed to use “personal context,” which includes any information you put into Apple-native apps like iMessage, Notes, Calendar, Mail, and Photos. Siri will also be aware of what’s on your screen—so if you scroll past a picture of a nice park on Instagram, you can ask it to identify the location. (It’s still unclear whether Siri will integrate with non-Apple apps; that may be up to individual developers.)

There are already apps like Poppy and Poke that aim to create this kind of mobile, agentic AI. But the paradox of these personal assistant tools is that you have to hand over a lot of personal data and privacy to make them work properly—which might end up causing more headaches (remember when a Meta researcher ran OpenClaw and accidentally deleted her entire inbox?).

I can’t say I’m thrilled about giving any tech giant my personal data, but Apple at least seems more focused on security than the other FAANG (or MANGO) companies. On-device AI is always more secure and energy-efficient than cloud computing, since data is processed directly on your phone. (That’s how current Apple Intelligence features like email summaries and AI emojis work.) For more complex tasks, Apple has pioneered private cloud compute (PCC), a method that allows devices to process complex data in the cloud without exposing it to Apple itself. As far as anyone knows, PCC hasn’t been hacked yet—and Apple offers a $1 million bug bounty to anyone who can prove otherwise.

In a recent conversation with writer Calvin Kasulke—who is so deeply immersed in internet culture that he wrote a novel set entirely on Slack—I admitted what feels like a taboo desire: to outsource all my “life admin” to an AI. “When you talk about the nonsense of the tech detritus in your life… I think the question is, ‘Is all that you have necessary?’ If it is necessary, isn’t it worth cultivating the skill and spending the time to do it?” Calvin told me. “I don’t think that those are skills that one should allow to atrophy.”

He makes a fair point. Maybe instead of asking Siri to remind me about a TV show a friend recommended, I could just pay better attention when I’m talking to them. I don’t want to get into the habit of forgetting important details from my conversations. “I’m sorry, but all of the commercials that are like, ‘What if I had the computer buy my kid a birthday gift?’ I’m like, ‘What if you learned what your kid likes?’… Like, I don’t know man, it sounds like [they] don’t want to do the fundamental act of being a person,” he said. Maybe when I say I want Siri to be like Emily from *The Devil Wears Prada*, I should remember that Emily’s character is on the verge of a breakdown. I know I can’t psychologically damage Siri the way Miranda Priestly damaged Emily, but will I become the kind of person who can’t function without a friendly robot voice in my phone? Do I want to be that person? At least Apple will let me opt out. Unlike Google’s controversial Search overhaul, the new AI Siri can be toggled on and off, so you’re not forced to use it. Until then, I’ll have to decide whether it’s worth tasting the forbidden fruit of Siri AI.