Apple is preparing to unveil a major revamp to Siri at WWDC in June, as reported by The New York Times today.
The report says the new version of Siri will be powered by generative AI, allowing it to be more conversational and understand more types of requests. Rather than focus on open-ended requests like a loquacious ChatGPT clone, Apple is using the new foundations to make Siri better at handling tasks like setting timers, creating reminders and more.
While we have been waiting for Apple to create a Siri 2 for what feels like a decade at this point, The New York Times says that generative AI has been labelled as a tentpole project inside Apple and the company made the decision to give Siri “a brain transplant” in early 2023.
The Times says Apple executives Craig Federighi and John Giannandrea tested ChatGPT extensively, and decided the company had to act and overhaul how Siri works to compete.
The generative AI version of Siri should allow it to be more conversational, understand context, and answer more reasonably. The current version of Siri is very much a one-shot question and answer system, that often misunderstands the user intent.
The new Siri will also be able to do things like summarize incoming text messages and notifications. Apple will boast that its approach is more private than rival offerings, as it will process most requests entirely on-device rather than relaying commands to the cloud.
But it remains to be seen what the limits and constraints of the on-device system will be. It’s also unclear whether all of Apple’s devices will be powerful to run on-device large language models, or if the new smarter Siri will be restricted to devices with powerful chips like the latest iPhone range, or the just announced M4 iPad Pro … but then that would leave products like the HomePod or Apple Watch stranded? The New York Times report says that Apple is increasing the RAM in the chips that power the upcoming iPhone 16 models to better support Siri and related LLM functions.
Apple has indicated it will take a hybrid approach, and is already filling data centers with its own Apple Silicon chips in order to expand its AI server capacity. There have also been reports of ongoing negotiations with Google to license its Gemini backend for some features.
The new Siri will be one of the flagship changes of iOS 18, which is believed to incorporate new AI-powered features across the system. Apple will announce iOS 18, and updates to all its operating systems, at its annual WWDC developer conference in June. As well as the AI focus, iOS 18 will likely include updates to the home screen, design tweaks and new functionality across many core apps.
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