In a surprising twist to the usual rivalry between Apple and Android, it was announced that Siri could soon ask Google Gemini for help with your queries if you need any backups.
At WWDC 2024, Apple announced its new approach to Artificial Intelligence, or Apple Intelligence as it wants to be known now, and Siri got a ton of improvements, like the ability to generate custom emojis, summarize long emails, and help you to edit photos. .
Pretty standard stuff then. However, an interesting additional detail is that Siri can pass your queries to another chatbot if it thinks that service might work better.
Currently, the only AI Siri will turn to is ChatGPT; However, during the keynote it was revealed that other AIs would be added in the future, and following the showcase, Apple's Craig Federighi named Gemini as an AI that Apple would like to integrate, before adding that Apple “had nothing to announce at this time. But that is our general direction.”
Gemini certainly makes sense, as it's a serious alternative to ChatGPT, but considering Gemini will be a major feature of Android devices, we're a little surprised it's shared with iPhones; Although we are not complaining.
Gemini and ChatGPT have been trading blows in recent months, and this addition isn't so much an improvement to AI-enhanced Siri, but rather giving you the freedom to choose which third-party service you want to trust.
Apple's privacy-first mantra
Siri will always ask your permission before consulting another AI and will only share data relevant to your query. If you don't want to share your data with OpenAI or Google, you can turn off the feature or decline Siri's request to use those AIs.
Apple's approach to privacy, and in particular transparency in the way it handles your data, seems to be the feature of its artificial intelligence services that it wants to highlight most. It brags about its private servers and says third-party organizations can verify its claims, things we're not really seeing from others in the AI space right now.
Given its history, we have reason to believe that Apple will stick to its guns in this regard, but we won't know exactly how it all works until we see how the new Siri works in practice. It's not currently in the iOS 18 beta, but we hope to get a chance to try it out soon.
