Amber Neely
Apple could announce an AI-powered version of Siri as soon as June, and there are signs inside the iOS 17.4 beta that it exists.
Apple has yet to release an equivalent to ChatGPT's artificial intelligence tools, but that doesn't mean it's not coming. The company has allegedly invested $1 billion in adding AI to Siri.
9to5Mac has uncovered code in the first beta of iOS 17.4 that suggests that Apple is still working on a new version of Siri. Interestingly enough, there are references to OpenAI within the code.
OpenAI's ChatGPT does not seem to power Siri's artificial intelligence features. Instead, it exists as a yardstick for Apple to compare its own Large Language Model (LLM) against.
Apple appears to be testing four different AI models, including AjaxGPT, its in-house LLM. The code shows that Apple is testing two versions of AjaxGPT, one processed on-device and one not.
9to5Mac also reports that Apple is testing a model dubbed FLAN-T5.
In early January, there were rumors that Apple was planning to integrate its generative AI technology into Siri and other services, with an announcement expected at the 2024 Worldwide Developer Conference.
Charles Martin
Christine McKee
Oliver Haslam
William Gallagher
7 Comments
This all makes sense.
Watch for Siri to become the first truly useful implementation of "generative AI," using sources of information that are reliable and actually paying for it. For instance, if you already have an Apple News subscription, Siri will be able to summarize the news for you in a morning briefing, using information from your subscribed content, and then interact with you to select and bookmark articles for further reading.
Waiting to see if these chat bots are an investment bubble or for real. There needs to be fact-checking, answer verification, and other sundry things in them, as well as anti-poisoning techniques if the replies are crowdsourced or amalgamated from the Internet.
Sounds great for well-defined and determinant problems, so it will have its uses.
I hope that this will improve the accuracy of Siri’s responses, although I won’t be holding my breath. We’re already getting a few Siri queries when we’ve said something that was interpretable by Siri as ‘Siri’ after the new ‘standalone’ word reaction was released in iOS 17. I’m not sure how much AI implementation is going to sort that out. Getting Siri do actually do the simple things on the phone that I ask it to would be nice. Maybe I mumble too much…
It’s hard to imagine that Siri could possibly get worse, but hopefully this will be an improvement.