My wish list for WWDC is simple. I’d love to see a new MacBook Pro and a significant upgrade to Siri, including a set of developer APIs that would allow a user to use Siri to ask intelligent questions, targeted at a specific app, and would also allow apps to provide context back to Siri to make it easier for the user to ask follow-up questions.

When Apple created AppleScript (System 7, back in 1993), they built a language that knew how to work with the objects of pretty much any app that used a basic programming building block, the Apple event.

AppleScript and Apple events made it easy for developers to make their applications scriptable. A similar mechanism for iOS would give the user the ability to ask a question targeted at a specific app, then ask follow up questions of that same app.

For example, suppose I had an app that managed my grocery list, keeping track of both ingredients and supplies. I might ask Siri a question like:

Hey, Siri, ask Cookster what I need to buy to make chicken casserole.

Siri could translate that into a query about the objects the Cookster app knows about, send it to Cookster, get a response, translate that back into a response for me.

I could follow up with:

Ask Cookster what I need to make twice as much.

This follow-on query would go right to Cookster, which presumably has maintained the context from the previous query and can update the response, back to Siri, and back to me.

This is a simple example, but it shows the value of offloading the burden of context to apps, instead of forcing Siri to know everything.

Just a dream. Go back to what you were doing.