Proof that Siri did downgrade

[George.24]

A few days ago, I was watching the 2015 WWDC where they announced some new Siri features. One of them was Photo Search. For example, they would say: “Hey Siri, show me the photos from Utah, last August”—and Siri would instantly open the Photos app with the right pictures, smoothly and accurately.
I tried asking my Siri the exact same thing (but with Chicago), and she’s completely useless.


Another cool feature they showcased was with the Reminders app. For example, if you were in a conversation in iMessage and told Siri, “Remind me about this later,” it would create a reminder with a direct link back to that exact spot in the conversation. The same worked with Safari or other apps.
Now, Siri just tries to get help from GPT—and it’s extremely useless.


For reference, I’m using an iPhone 16 Pro Max on iOS 18.6.2.

How can this be explained? Why is Siri way dumber than 2015 Siri?

 

[zula]

I've run into this as well. f you don't ever use ChatGPT integration you can just disable it in Settings/Apple Intelligence and Siri/ChatGPT/Use ChatGPT. However, if you do use it, you may be out of luck. Try leaving the ask before using ChatGPT on and pressing no whenever you want it to do other stuff. Alternatively, if you find Apple Intelligence non-useful (which let's be real no one finds it useful) you can just turn it all off and get the old orb Siri back.

 

[Slartibart]

for geotagged photos this works actually well… it does not work for untagged photos so seemingly. iPadOS 26 b8; iOS18.7; macOS 15.7 beta