Siri was supposed to become locally processed but sometimes can’t even set a timer because of a connection time-out. Or she’ll use her fancy ML speech recognition model to turn “set a timer for 3 minutes 10 seconds” into “search for trinity tensor”.
Siri is so bad it needs to be scrapped and rethought from the ground up (it can’t even give me the time when internet is down at my rural house). No one at Apple who wants a career there would dare propose that. The switch to a LLM architecture could be the perfect transition point for this.
If Siri can't give you the time without the internet, I think you need to update iOS.
There are definitely two tiers of Siri queries. There are queries like "set the brightness to 10%" or "set a timer for 5 minutes" which absolutely and consistently work without internet, and have for several years, and if you're legitimately having a different experience then its possible a cosmic ray hit your iPhone (or, realistically, you're running into a strange and rare bug which is not indicative of the general experience and will be fixed in three to five years or maybe never). There are also queries like "create a new note" (from the Notes app) which should be able to work offline, but don't. And, naturally, there are queries like "when did Resident Evil 4 come out" which wouldn't reasonably work without internet (but, if you're curious, she does get it right).
In other words, Siri clearly does some local guessing as to whether she can answer a query without the internet, and some queries appear to be miscategorized into the second bucket. My leading theory on why this happens, which may be incorrect, but it seems like: if an app has any Siri functionality which requires the internet to answer, all of the queries which are responded to by that app have to require the internet. It doesn't matter where the processing ends up actually happening to respond to the query, it just shuts the query down. Its weird, but its consistent with the behavior I've seen.
The more important point: Siri's real and weird limitations don't seem to have much to do with limitations in local processing. They've said that the speech interpretation all happens on-device. They encrypt practically all of your data that does get shipped to their servers, so a query like "Open the note titled 'Hello World'" is probably also being processed on-device. But: Siri still requires the internet for that query. That doesn't seem like a significant limitation with their ML algorithms or silicon or anything meaningful; it seems like just a case of dumb coding, which is certainly something Apple is no stranger to.
So much for an “unfathomable moat”.