[tsujamin]

They already have a compostable automation api with 3rd party integrations: Shortcuts!

It’s not perfect, but surely you could natural language -> llm -> temporary shortcut script and that gets you a decent part of the way to a smarter Siri

[krackers]

I'm not as familiar with Shortcuts API but from a quick glance it seems less rich than apple events/apple script. With LLM + apple script you could achieve computer use agents on easy mode. Not just one-off "what's the weather" queries but complex multi-step interactions like "send the latest photo I took to John".

To start with, Automator on mac would be the perfect place for LLM integration. And Script Editor too. Being perhaps one of the few read-only languages, people would probably _prefer_ an LLM spit out applescript for them. And Apple probably has the highest quality data set internally. Combined with the fact that there there is a uniform way to specify the API surface (sdef), this is a task that is possible by most LLMs today. Just apply a little marketing spin to change the angle from "niche power user feature" to "apple uses computer-use agent AI to allow average joe to automate their entire workflow" and it's a smash hit.

From there it's not much of a stretch to slap some speech recognition (just take Whisper, it already beats whatever iOS uses), add some guardrails, and have it be orders of magnitude better than what Siri currently is capable of. And this is all possible with today's LLMs, and thanks to deepseek without paying a cent to anyone else. When interactive computer-use does get mostly solved, that can be added in as a fallback for anything where applescript doesn't cut it (e.g. web navigation, electron apps, etc.). But there's a clear logical progression that allows you to easily evolve the user experience as the technology matures without having to throw out your stack the entire time.

But to me I think their fate was sealed was Shortcuts was shipped on mac when Automator already existed. And it's clear apple events has been a languishing feature, with integration in native apps already breaking.

[walterbell]

They have since added App Intents to the LLM automation stew.