My first 24 hours with Siri AI on a Mac

I turned off Siri on my Mac years ago and never looked back. Likewise, I found Apple Intelligence so unproductive that I never engaged with it. But the new Siri AI coming to macOS 27 Golden Gate has at least impressed me slight Rethink things.

I’m still early in testing Siri AI, as I’ve only been able to access it in the macOS 27 beta for a little over 24 hours. It’s also in early preview in developer beta, so there should be plenty of improvements before it’s released later this year. I don’t even know if my files and folders in our review unit were finished indexing MacBook Air M5 and M5 Max MacBook Pro. Unlike iOS 27 beta, there is no “Indexing in progress” box on the Settings page. I asked Siri if it could tell me, but it asked me to click a button that wasn’t in Settings.

My colleagues got a head start on testing Siri AI on iPhone and Apple watchand get reading Its general atmosphereSo far, they have gotten some positive feedback from using it. My feelings are a little mixed.

When I sit in front of a laptop, I don’t need a voice assistant to randomly search for things I’m curious about or check the weather like I do on my phone; I can do this faster and more accurately using a keyboard and mouse. So I tried to think of ways to let Siri AI help me on macOS — things that might be useful to me in my day-to-day work.

I’d be happy to automate some of the time-consuming benchmarking I do when reviewing laptops, but while Siri AI can launch apps, it can’t take actions within them (Apple has never claimed it can). Then I tried to find out if Phoebe encoding couple shortcuts He could get me there instead. This is not a Siri AI feature, but a new part of Apple Intelligence. I asked Shortcuts to run a test in Geekbench or Cinebench, capture the results in a screenshot, wait a few minutes, and repeat the process two more times. But the resulting automation couldn’t actually run the tests either. Apple Intelligence created a shortcut to open Geekbench and take screenshots (but forgot to actually run the benchmark), and created a Cinebench shortcut that has “Wait to run the test” as the actual step. Maybe if the developers keep expanding Application intentions This could work someday.

So, if Siri can’t help me run my benchmarks, maybe it can at least help me be a little faster at recording data. In a normal workflow, I run each benchmark three times, taking screenshots as I go, and later average the results before indexing them in a spreadsheet. Apple’s WWDC keynote showed someone using Ask Siri in Spotlight to analyze data in local files. So I tried selecting groups of these screenshots in Finder and asking Siri to average the scores for me. It worked well – most of the time.

It was smart enough to differentiate between single-core CPU scores, multi-core CPU scores, and GPU scores, average the test results, and arrange them in easy-to-read tables. But it can get thrown off if you include screenshots of too many different types of tests, especially if you mix them with synthetic results (Geekbench, PugetBench, etc.) and time-based results (Blender rendering tests and 4K video export tests). These are sometimes overshadowed by the CPU ratings data shown in Cinebench screenshots. Ideally, I’d be able to have Siri AI accurately calculate the averages of the 15 or so dozens of my screenshots at once — that would save me some serious time. But for now, it can only help me a little at best. And unless things improve, I’m still tempted to keep doing it all myself, especially since Siri got the numbers wrong a few times by pulling the wrong data.

So far, Siri AI seems more capable within the Apple ecosystem than it is outside of it, even for apps and files that are already on my Mac but in non-Apple apps. When I asked Siri to find photos of cats or kids, it pulled results from Apple’s Photos and Messages apps. This could be enough for many people, but not for me. Most of my messaging is done through Signal, and photos are uploaded from my phone to Google Photos, not iCloud. Siri was also missing thousands of photos in my Lightroom Classic catalog, even though the files are stored locally in the Pictures folder and I kept asking him to access them directly. It’s possible that these files haven’t been indexed yet, but I have no way of knowing that.

Right now, I’m feeling similar feelings to when I tested the Copilot Vision last year. Like Copilot Vision, you can use Siri’s visual intelligence to ask questions about things on your screen. Like the co-pilot, it is limited. I’ve asked Siri to evaluate benchmark results in a spreadsheet in Google Sheets, but it can’t see all the data if it’s not visible on the screen all at once. I could have made it see the entire spreadsheet by downloading it as an Excel file and pointing Siri at it in Finder, but when I asked for the laptop with the highest single-core Geekbench score, it gave me multi-core data. Not great.

I opened Siri with Lightroom Classic running, on a black and white photo from my device Ricoh GR IV Monochrome ReviewI asked Siri how to make it look like a shot from a street photographer Alan Schaller. Siri provided specific value adjustments for exposure, contrast, etc., and adjusting these values ​​gave me a good result. Unfortunately, when I asked Siri to judge the result, it cajoled me, saying I’d perfected the look and achieved an “almost timeless feel,” the kind of behavior Apple says you’re not supposed to exhibit. (I thought we were past this.)

Then I downloaded the classic Gary Winograd photo and asked how to change the Lightroom settings to match that photo; Siri recommended setting the exposure to the value it actually was. So, some hits and some misses.

It’s still very early days for Siri AI, and a lot can change between now and the final release. But what’s already clear is that the experience is likely to be very different on an iPhone, where much of your data is kept within Apple’s apps, and on a Mac, where you’ll likely be moving between all sorts of apps and ecosystems in ways that limit what Siri can do. However, it’s faint praise, but this is still the most useful and helpful Siri ever. It’s Apple’s first real AI step.