What if Apple had spent ten years perfecting some fundamental capabilities?'

  1. Give directions and explain multistep processes clearly.
  2. Asking questions and prompting for answers needed to fulfill a request.
  3. Maintaining a transcript of previous queries and answers.
  4. Organize queries and answers into the user’s corpus and knowledge base.
  5. Draw on the corpus when replying to requests.
  6. Integrate into other subsystems and mediums, such as the file system, notes, tagging, text, audio, and video.
  7. Integrate into Shortcuts and automation tools.
  8. Understand and speak in multiple languages simultaneously.

These capabilities would set a foundation for Siri to be truly helpful and extraordinary and would be a demonstrable advancement in the art and science of User Interface and information architecture.

But Siri is more like a glorified <input> field on a Search web page. Without an Internet connection, Siri cannot answer a simple question, “What time is it?”

At some point, Apple folks made architectural decisions and set business priorities that fixed Siri on a path that neither delighted customers nor advanced the state-of-the-art.