Rui Carmo has this lovely riff about the assistant Apple should build but won't: one that knows your family's calendar, knows the kids' school routine, remembers that Tuesday is swimming, and can actually do things across the household. Not a chatbot. A shared brain for the people who live in your house. Reading it stung a little, because that's the product I've been waiting for since the original HomePod launched source.
The problem isn't the model. LLMs are good enough now. The problem is that Apple's privacy framing treats every account as a sealed island. My wife's calendar, my calendar, the kid's school PDF buried in someone's Mail — these never get to sit in the same context window. So Siri keeps answering like a stranger who just walked into the kitchen, instead of someone who lives there.
What a real family assistant needs is boring infrastructure: a shared, permissioned memory layer, multi-user voice ID that actually works, and the ability to take actions across apps without a Shortcut PhD. Google's Home stuff is closer in spirit but worse on privacy. Apple has the hardware spread — HomePods, Watches, iPads on the fridge — and refuses to connect the dots.
My hunch is someone outside Apple ships this first, probably as a janky self-hosted thing running on a Mac mini with local Whisper and a small model. And once it exists, going back to shouting "Hey Siri, set a timer" at a brick will feel medieval. If you've been tinkering in this space, now is the time — the gap is wide open.
