And a *lot* of people want to use Siri while driving, when they can't access the phone, at least not legally.
Do you drive to work?
I don't either, but I suspect anyone that does, and that's hundreds of millions of people in the US alone, would get a lot of value out of a version of Siri that can actually act as a "personal assistant", capable of doing things like booking a doctor's appointment that fits into their calendar, summarizing email, canceling subscriptions etc.
I use Siri daily for controlling HomeKit devices. She's not always on point though. I've named a light basically "Radiohouse", because that's what the designer called it, but 25% of the time she insists of playing radio instead of turning on the light. I'm not a native english speaker and communicate with Siri in Danish, but still. Siri is definitely not useless and I would love for her to become a lot better.
You may be right that the majority probably doesn't use Siri, but that's because it doesn't really make sense to use Siri on the phone. I rely on HomePod speakers to interface with it, that makes a lot more sense for me.
If you name your Hue light "House Music" and you're confused when you ask to "turn on house music", you've played yourself. I am interested to see if such a light was in the LLM context window or there were memories recorded of past bad encounters if an LLM would predict better...
Apple will remove successful phones models, because they did sell as well as expected, but they keep pumping money into software that still only does basic voice assistance? The problem for Apple is that they can't NOT invest in turning Siri into an AI product, because the stock would lose value the minute that announcement was made, regardless of how sound the financials of that decision might be.
I might be completely wrong and 80% of iPhone users use Siri, but I'd surprised if it's even 20%.
There's a lot of AI features that makes sense for Apple to include and develop, a voice assistant isn't one of them. If they want to turn Siri into an Apple ChatGPT, then that's slightly different, and more about getting yet another product that would make users sign up for a monthly iCloud subscription. If it's all on device though, that doesn't really seem like the goal.