Siri AI Beta Frustrates iPhone and Apple Watch Users, 9to5Mac Reports

The new Siri is intended to answer questions with access to richer knowledge, search through Messages and Notes for personal context, and act on what is on screen through onscreen awareness. 9to5Mac said social media posts show some users are disappointed because they expected tasks Apple never promised, while others are hitting performance and reliability bugs that make regular use frustrating.

Network connectivity problems are among the most visible. Some users repeatedly see 'Sorry, something went wrong' when invoking Siri, which 9to5Mac said appears to stem from a network communication issue between the phone and Siri's cloud backend. Disabling a VPN or changing Wi-Fi settings may help, according to the report, but Siri's interface does not explain the problem, leaving users with what the report called a useless voice assistant. The report also suspects Apple's cloud infrastructure is experiencing intermittent downtime that can cause requests to fail.

Indexing issues have also surfaced. Although new Siri is meant to be better at finding things on a device, some users find the opposite. When asked to 'Add eggs to my grocery list in Reminders,' Siri says it cannot find the list, 9to5Mac reported. The report cited repeated cases of users trying to turn off all alarms and being told they have no alarms, as well as HomeKit accessories that cannot be found consistently by name. These problems appear related to underlying search indexing bugs, but it is unclear what steps users can take to fix them. Some Apple Watch users have encountered odd cases such as being told they cannot set a timer because the Clock app is not installed on the device.

New Siri also seems to require the device to be unlocked for many requests, even when the 'allow Siri when locked' toggle is turned on in Settings, according to 9to5Mac. This applies to all sorts of queries that old Siri never required to be unlocked. Many people invoke Siri while the phone is locked, such as in a car or on the go with AirPods. The report said the problem appears when new Siri tries to access the semantic index for personal context and fails if the phone is locked, making even simple commands like 'Send message to [person name]' more annoying than they were with old Siri.

Users also report that new Siri is slower to answer queries, especially on Apple Watch. Although on-device models play a role in how new Siri operates, much of its processing happens in the cloud with Private Cloud Compute, so a slow network connection makes new Siri slow to respond even for basic requests such as sending messages or checking notifications, according to the report. Speed complaints are especially true when using Siri AI with watchOS 27 on an Apple Watch Series 9 or later, where saying 'start a 5 minute timer' can take many seconds to resolve, a regression from near-instant processing.

Some features and commands from old Siri are also missing or unreliable in the new system. 9to5Mac reported that Apple documents say asking about Health app data is not currently supported by Siri AI. Users of the ChatGPT integration can no longer prefix a command with 'Use ChatGPT' to direct the request accordingly. Some phrasings that old Siri understood confuse new Siri, annoying users who have become accustomed to asking something specific on a regular basis. The report said this is partly because new Siri can do more, making some specifically worded queries ambiguous compared with classic Siri's smaller scope.

Beyond bugs, users have complained about the way new Siri is presented in the interface. 9to5Mac cited criticism of prominent 'Ask Siri' buttons added across the operating system and the lack of a visible transcript showing what the phone heard the user say in the new Dynamic Island interface.

Apple is rolling out the new Siri gradually through a waitlist and labels it as a beta, indicating that the company still has follow-up work to do, according to 9to5Mac. The report's complaints span iPhone and Apple Watch, with the Apple Watch Series 9 or later running watchOS 27 singled out for particularly slow responses.