One of the big features Apple announced alongside the new Apple Watches is Siri AI—now available on your wrist! You need to join a waitlist to try Apple’s new and improved chatbot, and since my turn just came up, I put the new on-wrist Siri through its paces. Here’s how it went, and why I don’t think the experience lives up to Apple’s promises (yet, anyway).
What devices have Siri AI?
Since Siri AI requires Apple Intelligence, you’ll need a device that supports it. Those include iPhones 15 Pro and newer, and an Apple Watch that is Series 9 or newer. If you want to use Siri AI on the Apple Watch, you need both a supported watch and a supported phone—a new watch and old phone won’t do the trick. With my phone and watch both on iOS 27 (the iOS 27.2 developer beta on the phone; watchOS 27.0 on the Apple Watch Series 12), I enabled Siri AI in my phone’s Settings app, which put me on a waiting list. A few days later, I got a notification that I was in.
Siri AI on the Apple Watch is occasionally useful, but mostly disappointing
Once I’d upgraded to Siri AI on my watch, I went about asking it plenty of questions and watched it struggle to answer many of them. The first thing I tried was to ask where I could find the nearest yoga studio; it responded with a list of yoga studios, none of them particularly close to my home. After rewording my question a few times, it finally listed one about a mile away. This is one of those examples where using AI is less efficient than a Google search—or even plain old regular Siri: When I asked this same question of the old Siri model last week, it quickly found the closest studio.
With my phone in another room, I next decided to try some of the questions that Apple provides as examples on the WatchOS 27 page. Here’s how that went.
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“What’s a good warm-up for deadlifts?” Siri gave me paragraphs of text about the purpose of warmups in general. When I tapped “Show More,” I was sent to the bottom of a long bulleted list of exercises. I’m not reading all that.
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“Read my upcoming events.” Siri needed a good five seconds to think about this one, but then correctly rattled off my next few calendar appointments.
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“Set a new move ring goal.” Actually, I first started by asking what my Move ring goal was, and Siri could not tell me. So I blindly set a new goal, and later saw it updated to the new value in the Fitness app…sort of. When I asked for a goal of burning 350 calories, it gave me a goal of 350. When I asked for a goal of 325, Siri responded that it has changed my goal to 325, but when I checked the Fitness app, it showed that my goal had been set to 320 calories.
Siri AI sometimes performed well on the Apple Watch, but seemed to do better on my iPhone
I then put Siri AI to the test with a few requests that other Apple Watch users have reported give the chatbot some trouble. The first involved setting a timer; perhaps that function is buggy for some users, but it worked quickly for me. “Siri, set a timer for five minutes” did exactly that, with only a few seconds of waiting. Likewise, “Siri, what’s the weather for today?” brought up the weather forecast instantly.
One of the purported new features of Siri AI is its ability to search your emails and messages for information that is relavent to a conversation you’re having with it. On the Apple Watch, this doesn’t work for me as well as I would like. First, I asked Siri what my daughter had recently asked me to buy for her. (She is constantly texting me to ask for things.) Siri responded that my daughter had sent me a wish list of LEGO sets on Sept. 12. This is true. But it wasn’t until I specified, “wasn’t there a makeup kit?” that Siri was also able to find that request, which was from Sept. 13.
Meanwhile, the iPhone version of Siri AI was able to find the wishlist and makeup kit requests and tell me about them in the same initial response, without the additional prompting. In another test of its search capabilities, I asked who I had sent “Ramona’s dad’s phone number” to. The Watch version of Siri AI found that text message, but was only able to tell me the phone number of the person I had sent it to. Siri AI on the phone, on the other hand, was able to figure out that the person requesting the number had introduced themselves by name earlier in that conversation, and it told me exactly who that person was (even though I had not entered the name into my contacts).
Where Siri AI struggles on the Apple Watch
Still, plenty of requests don’t work even that well, or don’t work at all. The watch’s Siri app routinely crashes, taking me back to the home screen. Sometimes Siri’s voice breaks up, and it interrupts itself to start its message over again. Good save, but weird to listen to. Sometimes Siri “thinks” for a long time. Many requests take five to 10 seconds, during which time I certainly could grab my phone and look up the answer myself. Whenever Siri is stumped, it searches the web and gives me a sea of unhelpful text.
What do you think so far?
For example, I tried to see if Siri could explain a mysterious icon on my watch screen. I asked, “Why is this icon gray?” (in a variety of phrasings to clarify I meant one that I was looking at right now). Instead of telling me anything useful, or explaining that it can’t see my watch screen, it read me some text from the Internet about what gray icons mean, in general, as a concept. Another time, I asked it to resume playing my podcast. Instead of starting up my usual podcast app, it told me that Episode 550 of My Favorite Murder had just come out. I don’t like murder podcasts, have never listened toMy Favorite Murder in my life, and episode 550 was—now that I check—the third-most-recent episode, not the one that just came out. (The iPhone’s version of Siri AI, on the other hand, happily started my podcast app.)
At least one thing worked better on the watch: Both versions of Siri AI said they had no information on my sleep data, but the version on the watch was at least able to tell me what time I had gone to bed and what time I had woken up. That’s something.
The promised Conversations app likewise did not work as expected. When you press the digital crown on the watch, a mini app picker pops up with Siri in the center, surrounded by a few of your most recent apps. If you scroll down, you get the full list (or grid) as before. Tapping that center button is supposed to show you a list of recent conversations, but mine kept showing me “No conversations.” Later, exactly one conversation showed up there: the one where I asked what a gray icon meant. That was the only question in that conversation, even though I had been conversing with Siri all day.
Still a work in progress
I like the idea of the new Siri AI, and being able to ask follow-up questions is nice, especially now that I can interrupt the chatbot to clarify my questions. (“Give me two specific warm-up exercises I can do before snatches” got it to stop lecturing me about warm-ups in general.) But the long waits for answers, the frequent crashes, and the bot’s inability to access data that is right there on the device are frustrating. Here’s hoping it gets better with the next update.
