Turning off Apple's new Siri AI also ends 'Hey Siri' voice commands

A person who wanted nothing to do with the new assistant turns Siri AI off, then opens Photos the next day. The AI editing tools are still there. Image Playground still makes pictures, and the AI writing tools still show up across apps ^[5]. Those features belong to Apple Intelligence, the platform Siri AI runs on top of ^[4], and according to Fast Company there is no way to shut them off ^[5].

Fast Company calls the Siri setting a kill switch and says Apple has built something rival chatbot makers have not ^[11]. What it switches off is Siri as a whole. The agent goes, and so does a plain request like "Hey Siri, turn on my bedroom lights" ^[6][7]. Turning on a lamp is a different job from holding a conversation with a chatbot, but the settings screen offers one button for both ^[3][7].

The screen assumes people either want Siri or do not. The people Fast Company has in mind for the switch are consumers growing more cautious about what AI will do to their lives and to society ^[13]. I'd expect plenty of them still want to tell their phone to turn on the lights. The switch gives them no way to keep that and lose the chatbot.

For the person whose worry is what the agent can see, a narrower control sits under Settings > Siri > App Access, where access granted to individual apps can be revoked ^[9]. Siri stays on, so voice commands keep working. Fast Company says Siri AI is sandboxed and cannot read app data without an explicit grant ^[9]. The same article says it has indexed all the data on the iPhone and can understand what is on the screen ^[2]. The article does not explain how the index and the per-app grants fit together.

Fast Company's own case for flipping the switch is modest. For someone with no plans to use Siri AI, there is little reason to leave it on, and turning it off might add a few minutes of battery life ^[12].

For a team adding AI to a product people already use, the Siri switch suggests two tests for any off switch. The first is collateral loss: whether opting out of the AI removes features the user never asked to lose. The second is what stays on after the user says off. A switch that passes both is a clean opt-out. A switch that fails the second test needs a settings screen that says which AI keeps running. One that fails the first should list the losses before the confirm button. A finer split has its own cost, since each extra toggle is another setting for support to explain. On Fast Company's account, Apple's Siri switch fails both tests: it takes voice commands with it ^[7] and leaves Apple Intelligence running ^[5].