Until today, I’d lived with a single phantom unread message in Apple Messages for so long that I don’t even remember not having it. It was on every Apple device I have, never showed up in the ‘Unread Messages’ filtered view and I had tried everything short of resetting my phone. Yes, I asked all the AI bots.

I decided to ask Perplexity again today and one of the suggestions, which I had not seen previously, was to ask Siri if I had any unread messages. It proceeded to read me several and when it was done, my phantom unread message was no longer there! Miraculously, Siri finally did something actually useful.