⌥ Siri Takes on Siri, Now Old Enough to Drive

In March 2018, I compared the original 2010 demo of Siri against the then-current shipping version. That was eight years ago — closer, in fact, to the launch of the iPhone 4S and Apple’s version of Siri than to today. Not much changed after I did that little experiment until Monday, when Apple announced a “profoundly more capable” Siri. Called Siri A.I., it will officially launch in beta with this year’s operating system upgrades. But I recently got access to the first preview of it in the first developer build of iOS 27 and, naturally, I had to try the same set of queries. “I’d like a romantic place for Italian food near my office”: Apple’s previous Siri implementation always — for me, at least — got tripped up by the “near my office” part. New Siri did this flawlessly. “I’d like a table for two at Il Fornaio in San Jose tomorrow night at 7:30”: Outside attempting this demo in 2018 and again today, I have never tried to book a restaurant reservation using Siri, so my sample size is…