I just met the new Siri. Here's what it's actually like

I've spent more years than I'd like to admit talking to Siri like it's a slightly confused intern. You ask it to text your husband; it offers a web search. You say "call Jeneva"; it dials Doug. Somewhere along the way, like a lot of people, I decided Siri and I would always hate each other a little.

So when Apple invited me into a room at Apple Park on Monday, June 8, to try the all-new Siri AI first hand, I was cautiously optimistic. I walked out hopeful — with one big caveat I'll get to.

The first thing you notice is that it's just there. No new app to download, no account to set up. You summon it the way you always have — "Hey Siri," the side button — or with a new swipe down from the top of the screen that drops you straight into a conversation.

That sounds small. It isn't. Apple’s put a fully capable AI within reach of hundreds of millions of people who've never once opened ChatGPT. To win them over, Siri doesn't have to be the smartest assistant on the planet, it just has to be the one that's already in their hand.

What it can do, when it works, is the part I got excited about. In the demos Apple ran for me, someone asked, "What podcast did my sister recommend?" and Siri pulled the answer out of an old message thread — no scrolling, no hunting. Another asked it to add items mentioned in a friend's camping email to a packing list, and remind them to pack when they got home. Two requests, one sentence, done — pulling from an email and setting a location-based reminder in a single breath.

I have to be straight with you here: these were Apple's demos, on Apple's phones, with Apple's pre-loaded data. There was no sister, no real camping trip — just carefully chosen scenarios designed to show Siri at its best. That's not nothing, but it's also not the same you and me using it in our very real lives. The true test comes when it launches this fall.

Still, the idea hits home, because it's the exact problem I fight every single day: I know I saw that restaurant recommendation, that confirmation number, that link my friend swore I'd love — somewhere. A text? An email? Instagram? If Siri can now reach across all of it and just find the thing, that alone could save me hours a week. The new visual smarts are a nice bonus, too: point your camera at a dinner bill to split the check, or at a backpack to ask if it'll pass as a carry-on.

Apple's pitch alongside all this is privacy, and it's a smart one. For Siri to be useful, it has to rummage through your most personal stuff — your messages, your mail, your photos. Apple says it handles what it can right on your device, and that anything sent to the cloud is used only to answer your request and then deleted. Apple can’t see it, and Google can’t either. (Google's Gemini models help power all of this — itself a remarkable admission from a company that usually insists on building everything itself.) That promise is doing a lot of work. The more your assistant knows about you, the more it matters that the company behind it keeps its word.

Here's my honest hesitation. Like a lot of people, I live on Apple hardware but spend my days in other companies' apps — Gmail, WhatsApp, Google Photos. Siri can read what's on my screen in any of them, but that's surface-level. Until those apps actually let Siri in, my real digital life has a big blind spot. And in the demos, I noticed a beat — sometimes an uncomfortable one — between asking and answering. Maybe that's the beta. They'll need to close that gap before this reaches everyone this fall, or it'll be the first thing people complain about.

So I'm doing what I'd tell you to do: get excited, but proceed with caution. Apple has promised a smarter Siri before and left us waiting (for two years — a lifetime in the tech world). The demo is the easy part. The real test is whether it works with my messy inbox, my cluttered camera roll, my actual life — on a super-crazy-busy Tuesday when I just need it to work.

I can't wait to find out. I just won't believe it until it's on my phone.

Jennifer Jolly is an Emmy Award-winning consumer tech columnist and on-air contributor for "The Today Show." The views and opinions expressed in this column are the author's and do not necessarily reflect those of USA TODAY. Contact her via Techish.com or @JennJolly on Instagram.