Comment by Angostura
That's where people get confused - it's not a chatbot or an LLM - it's a voice command interface. Adding something to the shopping list, setting a timer, turning up the heating in the back room, playing some music, skipping a track, sending a message - it works perfectly well for - and that's what I use it for virtually every day.
This work is to turn it it into something else, more like a chatbot, presumably
Siri is already transitioning from an intent-based NLU system to an LLM.
In iOS 18.1 (on iPhone 15+) Siri is part intent-based, part on-device "Apple Intelligence" small LLM, and in iOS 18.2 it also supports off-device ChatGPT.
This year Siri 2.0 is expected to ditch the legacy intent-based system and instead use just the small on-device Apple Intelligence LLM plus (opt-in) off-device Gemini (running in some private cloud).