"New Siri update with major changes to the nanny function" - Gastbeitrag von Masterstudierende Caroline Mettler

Die Master­stu­die­rende Caro­line Mettler hat ein Zukunfts­s­ze­nario entworfen, dass zum kriti­schen Reflek­tieren neuer Tech­no­lo­gien einlädt.

New Siri update with major changes to the nanny func­tion 

Laun­ched in 2011, as a ground­brea­king example of AI in action, Siri was able to take over a consi­de­rable amount of the work from users already in fall 2020. This is how Apple’s Siri voice func­tion was described ten years ago: “Siri can make calls or send messages for you when you are driving, have your hands full or are simply on the road. You can even have messages announced to you via your AirPods. And Siri can make proac­tive sugge­s­tions, such as notifying someone when you’re late for a meeting. It makes it easy to stay in touch.”

Nearly two decades after the Siri launch thanks to years of deep-lear­ning tech­no­logy usage and other inno­va­tions, the virtual assi­stant Siri is far more accu­rate and func­tional than the version that shipped with the iPhone 4s back in 2011. Siri is now available in over 200 languages. You can pick one of 540 accents and even the pitch of the voice can be chosen with the newest update! After being ranked number one in the arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence ranking in 2026, Apple focused resources in the deve­lop­ment of the digital assi­stant inves­ting an incre­dible amount of money over the past years. 

The impres­sive results of endless hours of work by Apple’s devel­opers have been demons­trated on stage yesterday, by Apple’s new CEO, Sarah Lai. Various impro­ve­ments were revealed allo­wing further opti­mi­za­tion of the limited time at hand. Siri can now be connected to nume­rous inter­connected devices of today’s smart homes making it possible to shape the home envi­ron­ment from anywhere by taksing Siri to regu­late tempe­ra­ture, air quality and light levels in response to weather condi­tions and personal taste. Most impres­si­vely, however, is the latest Siri-Nanny update Apple revealed today.  

Since the lawsuit in 2026, where complaints were voiced that Siri harms children at a young age by telling them too strictly what to do, Apple has not released any updates to the nanny func­tion. It was widely believed that the tech giant was giving in to the complaints about ear-dama­ging signal tones for young human ears, espe­ci­ally after the public state­ment of former CEO Tom Cook saying that Siri should indeed not be used by children under 10 years. 

Now the big surprise! Apple seems to have used the past years to secretly develop nume­rous new features posi­tio­ning itself as the “best nanny to care for your child”, as Sarah Lai high­lighted several times during today’s presen­ta­tion. The Siri-Nanny 2.0 – Child-care edition comes as a surprise to all of us!

With the Siri-Nanny 2.0 – Child-care edition Apple cons­ciously starts a new era. Unbe­lie­vable but true, the app now teaches children up to 6 diffe­rent languages at the same time! An enor­mous deve­lop­ment, which was followed with heart and soul, accor­ding to the chief programmer, Anna-Maria Any. The new update allows mastery of the checks and reward system, commonly stated as the basis for good child-educa­tion, by infor­ming the parents after ticking off home­work  enab­ling them to praise the children through a private message once done. Once manda­tory tasks are finished, the children can freely arrange their time but get assi­stance by Siri who advises on the best acti­vity to balance the child for the day by regis­te­ring how much the child has moved, eaten, read and so forth. Effi­ciently opti­mi­zing the children’s time and way of life reli­e­ving the parents so that Apple’s new director predicts a slump in divorce as parents have more time to spend together. Children on the other hand feel more free and inde­pen­dent from an early age on and will hence be more happy in the long run, stated Sarah Lai poin­ting to a study by Harvard on that topic. Of course, it should be noted that “self- or pre-struc­tu­ring” by the parents can also hold dangers in the sense of handing too much respon­si­bi­lity to the children. However, Apple’s media spokes­woman appeals to the parents’ common sense poin­ting out that only children, who are able to occupy them­selves for two hours without Siri and who have the appro­priate level of deve­lop­ment and age should be cared for and looked after by Siri-Nanny 2.0.

Amazon recently presented the physi­cally tangible and moving Alexapro, which has some! similar capa­bi­li­ties to Siri-Nanny 2.0 and, like a pet, can move through the home and vacuum clean at the same time but Apple’s newest update overs­ha­dows anything similar by far. No surprise that the Siri-Nanny 2.0 app has been down­loaded over 1 billion times – which is 1% of the entire huma­nity – in the past 24 hours.

Zur Autorin:

Caro­line Mettler ist aktuell Master­stu­die­rende in Sozialer Arbeit und besucht Vorle­sungen der Berner Fach­hoch­schule, der Hoch­schule Luzern sowie der OST. Sie arbeitet als wissen­schaft­liche Assis­tentin an der OST am Institut für Soziale Arbeit.

Der Beitrag erschien erst­malig auf dem foraus-Blog.

Titel-Bild - Omid Armin via Unsplash, Foto C. Mettler - privat