Product1 publisher2 min readPublished
Siri AI asks for an unlocked iPhone to run commands the old assistant took locked
Apple's new assistant arrived this month behind a waitlist and a beta label. The complaints 9to5mac collected are mostly about the network path underneath it and the search index it depends on.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- Siri AI reached the public this month as part of iOS 27, going out gradually through a waitlist and carrying a beta label that Apple has not removed.
- Users invoking the new assistant repeatedly get a "Sorry, something went wrong" error, which 9to5mac attributes to network communication between the phone and the Siri cloud backend, sometimes cleared by disabling a VPN.
- Search indexing bugs have Siri saying it cannot find a Reminders grocery list, reporting no alarms when asked to turn all alarms off, and missing HomeKit accessories by name.
- Many requests now need the iPhone unlocked even when the "allow Siri when locked" toggle is enabled in Settings, a requirement the old Siri did not impose.
- On watchOS 27 with an Apple Watch Series 9 or later, asking Siri to start a five minute timer can take many seconds, where the same request used to resolve almost instantly.
Compiled by The Product DeskSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- constraint Voice matters most when hands are busy, and the semantic index failing on a locked device takes the car and the AirPods case off the table for anything touching personal context.
- cost The diagnosis cost lands on support and on the user: a person hearing "something went wrong" cannot tell whether to blame their VPN, their Wi-Fi, or Apple's servers.
- decision Product teams building on a cloud-served assistant have to decide now what their app does when the round trip is slow or fails, because returning nothing is what users are posting about.
- precedent A beta label buys room for index bugs, but it also sets the comparison users will keep making, which is the old assistant's near-instant timer on the same watch.
An Apple Watch answered a request for a timer with "I can't set a timer because the Clock app isn't installed on this device", one of the odder reports in 9to5mac's roundup of Siri AI complaints [8]. Of the five categories the site assembled from social media posts, two come back to the cloud round trip and two to the device's own search index; the fifth is about features that have not been connected yet [3][17].
Part of Siri AI runs on-device. Much of the processing happens in Apple's cloud through Private Cloud Compute, so the speed of a reply tracks the quality of the connection, including for basic requests like sending a message or checking notifications, according to 9to5mac [11].
The unlock behaviour is the one a help desk will hear about first. 9to5mac's reading is that personal context comes from the semantic index, and that lookup fails when the phone is locked, so even "Send message to [person name]" now waits for a passcode [10]. People reach for Siri in a car or through AirPods, which is precisely when the phone is locked [18]. The "allow Siri when locked" toggle stays switched on through all of it [9].
When the invocation path fails, the user gets "Sorry, something went wrong" and no statement of what failed [4][5]. 9to5mac suggests disabling a VPN or changing Wi-Fi settings, and also suspects intermittent downtime in Apple's cloud infrastructure [4][6]. A voice prompt cannot hand any of that to the person holding the phone.
The fifth category is coverage. Apple documents that Health app data is not currently supported by Siri AI, and people who used to route a request by prefixing it with "Use ChatGPT" can no longer do that [13][14]. 9to5mac also found phrasings that old Siri understood and new Siri gets confused by, plus users expecting tasks Apple never promised [16][15].
Shipping teams assume users ask the hard questions that reward a better model. On the evidence of the complaint list, users do chores: timers, alarms, lists, a lamp by name.
For anyone shipping an assistant of their own, the split that matters across the twenty most common utterances is whether a request needs the network and whether it needs an authenticated session. The ones that need both fail for reasons the user cannot see and cannot repair, so they turn into tickets. A command that used to need neither and now needs both is a regression, whatever the new system can do in principle. On watchOS 27, according to 9to5mac, that is where the five-minute timer now sits [12].
What to watch
- Whether a follow-up iOS 27 release lets Siri distinguish a network failure from an index failure in what it tells the user.
- Whether the unlock requirement survives the beta, or Apple routes commands that need no personal context around the semantic index.
- Whether Health app queries and the 'Use ChatGPT' prefix return to Siri AI, or stay documented as unsupported.