I wasn't expecting Apple to force-feed the AI into my mouth with this new Siri release, but turning "Apple Intelligence" into "Siri AI" and removing the opt-out toggle is gross.
(You can't disable all of other fka Apple Intelligence stuff without disabling Siri AI, and you can't disable Siri AI without switching your Siri language to an unsupported region and turning a bunch of stuff off in Content Privacy and Restrictions. On Watch, Siri is front and center of your Suggested Apps carousel --- which they removed Recent Apps to create, an extremely useful feature --- unless you change YOUR ENTIRE WATCH'S REGION to some other unsupported country. None of this is okay.)
Anecdotally, I can do all of the stuff you've listed can be done without Siri AI or "Classic" Siri and get correct answers almost 100% of the time.
"privacy is a right"
becomes
privacy is a "defaults write <obscure-key>"
* When I need a prescription refilled, the quickest way is to message my doctor using the patient portal. I created a Shortcut that lets me pick among 5 medications; Apple Intelligence then generates a message with the request to the clipboard which I paste into the message field and send.
* I have a Shortcut that creates a morning summary: Apple Intelligence generates the weather report. I also get what’s on today's calendar and any current or past-due Reminders.
Just scratching the surface here; will flesh these out more later and create some new ones now that I'm running the release version of Golden Gate and not the beta.
Using Shortcuts, a user can use the Cloud model via Private Cloud Compute, the Cloud Pro with "world knowledge, and the on-device model. It occurred to me I probably don't need the Cloud; I switched to the on-device model, which worked fine.
There's no way for Siri or anybody else to know anything about a transaction using Private Cloud Compute:
We designed Private Cloud Compute to make several guarantees about
the way it handles user data [1]:
A user’s device sends data to PCC for the sole, exclusive purpose of
fulfilling the user’s inference request. PCC uses that data only to
perform the operations requested by the user. User data stays on the
PCC nodes that are processing the request only until the response is
returned. PCC deletes the user’s data after fulfilling the request,
and no user data is retained in any form after the response is
returned. User data is never available to Apple — even to staff with
administrative access to the production service or hardware.
Not a bad list from Apple.