It was early morning at the Apple Store, somewhere around 6 a.m., and we hadn’t opened the doors yet. A handful of us, Geniuses, Creatives, the particular breed of person who willingly shows up before sunrise to be the first to touch a new phone, had been handed shiny new iPhones and told to get familiar with something called Siri.

We were immediately obnoxious about it.

“Siri, where’s a good place to hide a dead body?”

Without missing a beat: “What, again?”

The store lost its mind.

“Siri, don’t be such a btch.”

“Language, please!”

We were hooked. We were also, in retrospect, witnessing the absolute ceiling of what Siri could do, which was deliver a clever comeback and then go back to confidently mishearing your alarm requests. That launch day, I taught workshops on how to use her. Set timers. Send messages. Ask about the weather. The basics, because the basics were basically all there was.

That was 2011. It’s 2026 and the material I taught that day hadn’t changed since launch day.

Until last week.

The Decade-Long Disappointment Arc

Let me be clear, I say all of this with affection, because I genuinely loved working with Apple, loved that launch day, and have been an iPhone girlie ever since. But Siri and I have had what you might call a complicated relationship.

She set the wrong timers. She called the wrong contacts. She confidently sent texts that said things I absolutely didn’t say and then just… moved on with her life. She became the butt of every tech joke for a reason, and that reason is because she kind of earned it. While ChatGPT was writing cover letters and Google’s AI was summarizing your inbox, Siri was out here asking if you’d like her to search the web for that.

We kept using her anyway, because, of course we did, we’re women. We’re used to working with systems that weren’t quite built for us and making them work regardless.

But something shifted at Apple’s WWDC last week. Something significant enough that I’m finally updating the workshop.

Meet the Siri You Actually Deserved

The new Siri AI isn’t a patch. It’s not a software update dressed up in a press release. It is, according to Apple, a ground-up rebuild and for once, that actually appears to be true.

Here’s what she can do now: hold a real-life, back-and-forth conversation without losing the thread. Pull context from your emails, your messages, your photos, and actually do something with it. Take action across multiple apps without you having to explain yourself six times. And, here’s the one that made me sit up straight, if you’re on a phone call, Siri can now pull context from your Mail and Messages in real time to help you respond.

Let me translate that into the language of women who do everything:

You’re on a call with your kid’s school. You can’t remember if you already sent in the permission slip. Siri knows. You’re scheduling a dentist appointment and can’t remember what month works because your calendar lives in three different apps. Siri’s got it. You’re trying to remember what you told your boss last Tuesday. Siri read the email.

She is, functionally, the personal chief of staff that the rest of us have been quietly fantasizing about for years while watching people with actual assistants breeze through their days.

Now, I’d be doing you a disservice if I didn’t pause here for one second and say: your phone reading your emails, your messages, and your photos in real time is either incredibly convenient or mildly terrifying, depending on how many secrets you’re keeping and how much you trust Apple’s privacy promises. That’s a conversation worth having with yourself. Apple has staked its entire brand identity on privacy, and the new Siri is built to process most of this on-device. But “trust but verify” is always a reasonable position when your assistant knows more about your schedule than your mother does.

Okay, the second was taken, the words were said and now, back to the glow-up.

The new Siri is powered by a custom version of Google’s Gemini model under the hood — which Apple will never say out loud at a keynote, but which explains a lot about why she suddenly got so much smarter. The brand is still Siri. The brains are Gemini in a turtleneck. I’m not here to litigate that. I’m simply here to report that the results are genuinely different, and different in ways that matter to the people managing the most moving parts.

They Also Finally Listened to the Moms

This is the part where I’m going to add something that didn’t make as many headlines but absolutely should have: Apple used WWDC this year to roll out significantly reinforced parental controls alongside all the AI announcements.

I’ll keep this brief because I’m not here to lecture. Y’all don’t need me to tell you what you already know about kids and screens. But I will say this: the people who’ve been the loudest, the longest, about what technology needs to do better for families have largely been women. Mothers, teachers, pediatric researchers, the occasional exhausted aunt. And for years, the response from the tech industry was essentially a shrug and a “parental controls are in settings.”

This year felt different. Apple led with fixes before features. Parental controls weren’t an afterthought buried in a sub-menu; they were actually part of the main stage conversation. Whether that’s genuine accountability or good PR is, again, above my pay grade. But the fact that the pressure worked? That’s worth noting.

Women asked to be heard. On this one, they were.

So, About That Workshop…

I’ve been teaching people how to use their technology since before most of them knew they needed to learn. From a launch-day crowd of bewildered iPhone owners asking Siri obnoxious questions, to women in my own community who just want their tools to actually work for them, the through-line has always been the same: you deserve technology that meets you where you are.

For a long time, Siri wasn’t that. She was charming and occasionally funny, but wildly unreliable.

The new Siri might actually be that. And if you want to be ready for her, if you want to know how to talk to AI in a way that gets you real results, you should check out the guide I built: Stop Apologizing to ChatGPT! The Blonde Byte’s No BS AI Prompt Playbook. It’s got the same energy, but a lower bar for technical jargon. Plus, a much higher bar for results.

Because the technology industry is finally listening to us.

Wanna try the new Siri? You can register as an Apple Developer and download the MacOS, iOS, or iPadOS today. A free, public-beta version of the software will be released in July. Tell me in the comments if you’ve tried it — I genuinely want to know if she’s living up to the hype or if we’re still in “set a timer” territory.