Typing to AI assistants might be the way to go

There’s a time and place for everything. In the privacy of my own home, I’ve got no problem saying “hey” to Google, Alexa, Siri, Meta, and on occasion, Bixby. But out in public? Where other people can perceive me? I’d rather crawl under a rock.

This has been one of my biggest problems with AI gadgets these past few months. All of them seem convinced that the best way to interact with AI assistants is to actually talk to them, not unlike the movie Her. In reality, I’ve rarely seen my friends and family use their phone’s assistants when we’re hanging out privately and never out in public. So it felt like a tiny “Aha!” moment when, during last week’s WWDC keynote, Apple mentioned that iOS 18 will let you type to Siri instead.

Technically, you can already do this via the iPhone’s accessibility settings. (Go to Accessibility > Siri > Type to Siri.) This brings up a fairly bare-bones window and keyboard for you to type a command in. But in iOS 18, Apple embraces the feature, letting you double-tap the bottom of the screen to bring up a Siri keyboard. You’ll also be able to see quick suggestions that you can simply tap instead of having to type (or say) a whole query out.

There are a ton of reasons why this just makes sense. While digital assistants have gotten better at understanding commands, it’s still tough to talk to them naturally. At home, I feel myself affecting a certain pitch and tone when I use a wake word. I find myself thinking beforehand about how I want to word a query. In spite of myself, I still occasionally botch it when asking Google to turn my living room lights to 25 percent brightness. I feel even more self-conscious if I have to do this in public.

Outside, it’s also incredibly noisy. While testing the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses’ multimodal AI features, I often had the AI tell me that the glasses couldn’t hear me properly. Either my environment was too loud, or I was subconsciously so embarrassed I spoke too quietly for the device to clearly pick up what I was saying. That led to a ton of frustration, which, in turn, caused me to whip out my phone — the exact opposite of what AI hardware wants me to do.