The fake promise of better Siri

On The Vergecast: AI gadget failures, how Tesla became politics, and Sonos’s TV dreams.

by David Pierce

Mar 14, 2025, 12:50 PM UTC

David Pierce is editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host with over a decade of experience covering consumer tech. Previously, at Protocol, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.

Apple Intelligence is technically lots of things, but there’s only one feature with the potential to actually meaningfully change the way you use your phone. That would be Siri, which Apple said last year it had turned from a quasi-helpful voice assistant into an AI-powered helper that could understand everything about you and accomplish things on your behalf. Sounds cool, right? It was one of the flagship features of the iPhone 16 lineup, a big part of the way Apple promoted its new devices. Except it doesn’t exist. And it won’t anytime soon.

On this episode of The Vergecast, we talk about exactly where things went wrong with Siri — and with the whole gadget industry, which became so enraptured with the promise of AI that it sort of forgot to make good gadgets. Nilay and David discuss the problems and promise with Alexa, the still-enticing ideas behind “ambient computing,” and what it’ll take for Apple to make things right. (Side note: if you haven’t read John Gruber’s essay on the subject at Daring Fireball, you should — we recorded this episode before it published, but it’s an excellent summary of the situation.)

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After that, The Verge’s Andy Hawkins joins the show to talk about the state of Tesla. As Elon Musk continues to try and tear down the federal government, his electric car company has become a uniquely politicized thing – there’s just no other way to explain the car show put on by President Trump on the White House lawn this week. Tesla’s rise has in so many ways enabled Musk’s own, and it appears man and company are more closely tied than ever. That might be a problem for the car company.

Finally, in the lightning round, Nilay and David discuss the end of Sonos’s set-top box dreams, some big news in the Home Assistant world, Brendan Carr’s latest regulatory absurdities, what’s next for Pokémon Go, TikTok’s new tool for teens, and Bluesky CEO Jay Graber’s epic sartorial shitpost.

If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started, beginning with Apple: