Apple Is Handing a Lot of Power to Its Huge Rival: Parmy Olson

Tim Cook’s last annual showcase of new software as Apple Inc.’s chief executive officer also marked the start of a deepening relationship with one of his biggest competitors: Alphabet Inc.

It was long expected that the highlight of Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference this week — a prerecorded glorified infomercial for the public and workshops for programmers — would be an artificial-intelligence upgrade to the virtual assistant Siri. A proper one. Apple claimed two years ago that Siri would soon read content on an iPhone screen and complete multi-step tasks such as taking some text from Notes and sending it to a ...