SiriGPT: Apple's chiefs hope to add full chatbot functionality to Siri, eventually

AppleInsider

Apple's executives are pushing for Siri to become a proper AI chatbot that scours the web, potentially as a direct competitor to ChatGPT. It's just not clear when that's going to happen.

Apple's leadership wants Siri to have ChatGPT-style smarts.

As part of the Apple Intelligence shift, Apple said it would overhaul Siri to be more context-aware, but that change has yet to arrive. However, if the urges of Apple's chiefs to change course work, Siri could become even more powerful down the road.

According to Apple employees speaking to Bloomberg on Sunday, Apple executives are keen to make Siri into a competitor to current top chat bot, ChatGPT. While former Siri chief John Giannandrea was apparently reluctant to go down that route, the company's leadership are leaning to go that way with Siri.

Siri already has an integration with ChatGPT. Such a move could eliminate reliance on OpenAI's service for responses, and keep the queries in-house.

A chatbot that Apple has been reportedly testing internally for years has apparently done extremely well in the last six months. Employees claim that the internal bot is on a similar level to responses from ChatGPT.

Management has also talked about the possibility of letting the chat bot the option of scouring the Internet and use data from multiple sources to create answers to queries. This is similar to how many other chatbots work, expanding their existing knowledge graph with live data from elsewhere.

A Siri renaissance

Refocusing efforts on making Siri work with an Apple chatbot can be beneficial to Apple beyond just making Siri smarter.

For a start, a better and more powerful Siri that could answer search queries like ChatGPT could help offset some related costs. With Apple's $20 billion default search deal with Google in jeopardy, Apple has to do other things to make its hardware and software more attractive to new buyers, and the Siri overhaul could do the trick.

Another feature that was announced as coming to Siri but got delayed could also help. The feature of using Siri to work more deeply with apps on an iPhone could let Siri respond to queries and commands by triggering actions in apps on the user's behalf.

Such a feature would keep the App Store relevant and maintain its position as a $20 billion per year business. With the potential for chatbots to take over from apps in terms of general usage by iPhone owners, this functionality could still keep the app economy ticking over.

No song and dance

While the future may be bright for Siri, it's unlikely that Apple will crow about its plans at WWDC 2025, starting on June 9.

There are plans to talk about inbound changes to Apple Intelligence, including an AI-optimized battery management system. However, Siri updates are likely to be downplayed, even those seemingly months away from shipping.

Apple is also apparently preparing to separate Siri and Apple Intelligence for marketing purposes. Apparently, Siri's poor reputation is damaging that of Apple Intelligence.

As for when to expect the new Siri with chatbot smarts, don't count on hearing about it anytime soon. Apple has seemingly learned its lesson with the Apple Intelligence announcement, and now intends to avoid announcing new features more than a few months ahead of their intended launch.



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indieshack

Suggestion for Apple: don’t talk about AI plans, first enact them then surprise us all with a beta release. Last year’s WWDC AI announcements looked like vaporware. Just do it.

massiveattack

Appleinsider is way too optimistic. 

After reading the article today, I remain hopeless.

Am I the only one who seriously asks how Apple could be the most valuable company (now, the 3rd most valuable company based on market cap.) after reading this article???

Wow... If that is true, all executives are paid for nothing. WAY WAY overpaid..

I hope Apple really gears up and brings some competent Siri Intelligence in the near future.

But after reading this artice, I remain hopeless.

mattinoz

Apple should be using their on device power and security model to make a me and my family trained chat bot.  It’s not about something it found on the web for me. 

libertyandfree

This is my favourite line “ Apparently, Siri's poor reputation is damaging that of Apple Intelligence”.  Ya think!  Siri has been an embarrassment for at least 5 years now and it’s such a shame since Apple was the leader when they integrated SIrI and one would think with having total control over the entire HW and SW ecosystem Siri would be world class but it’s a laughingstock.  I have little faith that Apple can make Siri great by adding AI maybe just retire Siri and bring out a whole new assistant with AI.  

thrang

Meh, most of the general public isn’t doing anything with “AI”… there’s plenty of time… most still can’t define it.

grizzmick

I actually never use Siri except to muck around asking silly questions to amuse my daughter, it’s pretty good for that. 

thesparkle

Weather. That’s what I’m reduced to using Siri for. 

As long as Apple never removes the “I found some web results…” response to practically every other question I ever ask it, I’ll be happy. I absolutely love that…

michelb76

Plenty of time for Apple to figure it out, as AI use is still pretty low. But making a chatbat interface would be very uninspired as the current text chat interfaces are mediocre at best. I'd expect deeper integration in my daily tasks.

ravnorodom

I think Apple Intelligent wants their own GPU server farm running just for them. I would say after 5 years of their data center expansion in North Carolina, it would put Apple in a strong position to control its AI infrastructure end-to-end, reducing reliance on third-party cloud providers and giving them a major competitive edge in on-device and cloud-based AI services.

avon b7

ravnorodom said:

I think Apple Intelligent wants their own GPU server farm running just for them. I would say after 5 years of their data center expansion in North Carolina, it would put Apple in a strong position to control its AI infrastructure end-to-end, reducing reliance on third-party cloud providers and giving them a major competitive edge in on-device and cloud-based AI services.

While reducing dependencies is often a desirable goal (once cost considerations have been taken into account) I don't think it will be a major competitive cloud advantage seeing as all the major competitors already enjoy that advantage. 

jfabula1

Is it too late for Apple? The BUS left already? Knowing how they improve and implement, I think they are clinging behind the BUS…they usually are quite late but execute just fine.

blaurieter

Sadly, Siri has been going downhill for years.

It was initially a bright spot. You could ask things like "what flights are overhead" and it would draw data and display the flight information - now it just provides a link to FlightAware but cannot even pass the request. In those early days Siri was genuinely funny with multiple responses to pop culture tech requests like "Beam me up." or from Kubrick's 2001, "Open the Pod Bay Doors." Now nothing except perhaps a knock knock joke. At least I can ask for the temperature in Tokyo which again is just a request via Google.

Let's hope for a brighter future but they can also learn from Siri's past when it had a little more edge.

hammeroftruth

The big problem is the idea of a chatbot Siri sounds great, but when you factor in Apple’s fundamental pillar of privacy, it makes developing a product exponentially harder and takes a lot more time. 

The other complications are integrating Siri with other platforms like HomeKit and having it smart enough to know you, your smart devices at home, and your other Apple devices and work together while keeping your privacy. 

Sure, you can have your data on your device which is nice when it comes to privacy, but I haven’t been doing much actively using Apple intelligence and the database is 5gb. What happens in a year, especially if I start using it daily? They’re gonna have to figure out how to sell us personal iCloud storage for AI that is secure so nobody, even Apple, can access it or disseminate it. This is something I see happening within 6 years. 

tht

hammeroftruth said:

The big problem is the idea of a chatbot Siri sounds great, but when you factor in Apple’s fundamental pillar of privacy, it makes developing a product exponentially harder and takes a lot more time. 

The other complications are integrating Siri with other platforms like HomeKit and having it smart enough to know you, your smart devices at home, and your other Apple devices and work together while keeping your privacy. 

Sure, you can have your data on your device which is nice when it comes to privacy, but I haven’t been doing much actively using Apple intelligence and the database is 5gb. What happens in a year, especially if I start using it daily? They’re gonna have to figure out how to sell us personal iCloud storage for AI that is secure so nobody, even Apple, can access it or disseminate it. This is something I see happening within 6 years. 

Is it really a great idea, though? The narrative around AI is akin to it being a nuclear weapon or an "iPhone" in 2007. Lots of rah rah with it, but is it really beneficial in Apple's context?

What do people want a LLM chatbot to do? Is what they want to do something a LLM chatbot can do? What can it do on a phone?

1. LLM services are great as advanced search services as they complete the next step for what you want to do. It is a great feature for professional workflows, both as a service and implementation tool, which you don't do on a phone. Apple really doesn't offer this in its portfolio. They have done perfectly well without offering a search service (a la Google), a social media service (Facebook, etc), and whatever is out there. Asking Apple to offer search services is a very similar question, and they have been fine without it. How are the circumstances different?

So, I think they can just let this percolate among the community of LLM developers as they do their own. They don't offer any services open to everyone, save for Apple Music. Anything else? Not in their wheelhouse, nor is it needed for them to be successful.

2. What can an LLM chatbot do for you on a phone? A consumer features question.

Have been thinking about this for a while, and I don't have anything great. Summaries of web pages? It would be nice as virtually every web page is optimized to make the article as long as possible in order to maximize ads. LLM summaries will eventually be gamed to uselessness, possibly even outlawed if ads are stripped out. The gamification will surely result in the LLM summary containing the ads too.

An LLM service that is able to filter out or identify LLM content will surely be offered to help people avoid the chaff, just like there are email filters, message filters, and whatnot. We actually need something like this for human generated content too. An LLM service that reformats web pages to make them readable and reduce power consumption? Yet another ads and scams are destroying everything take there.

How about arranging a trip somewhere? I can't see how this will effectively work, unless Apple, or LLM service, owns all the parts including credit cards. Like, the prompt will take just as much work to write as searching and buying yourself. Then, which service would like to participate? Expedia? The bank? The airline? 

ailooped

There is an odd discrepancy here, why isn’t Microsoft expected to make their own chatgpt? They use openai, apple uses openai. If anything, apple has a better implementation. Why these double standards?


While impressive, its crap. 40% wrong answers is too much for it to be relied on, I do not understand how people act like it is so great?

The image/video generation stuff is not ready for primetime, even though it shows promise for something down the line, its just not the hyped up thing everyone thinks and says it is. Everyone is pretending like you will be able to just hit a button and get an oscar level film out of it. No, it can’t do hands, it can’t do backgrounds without doing obvious mistakes. Even if they fix those issues, it does not know how to act out a performance you would want to watch.

That said, I am not saying it isn’t capable of transforming alot of how the current tech landscape and even how some industries work. But you must understand the limitations and abilities.


Nvidia using it as a denoiser and eventually a replacement for pushing 3d graphics at all, shows what the promise is down the line.


LLM’s and image generation is not AGI. A fantastic parrot yes, but still a parrot. Would you trust a parrot to answer the phone for you? That seems to be the expectation currently, that you can take this amazing parrot and fire people and let it do their job. Wow… 

edited May 20

dutchlord

Siri is switched off on my devices for years already as it does not work at all. AI is not available on my devices and in my region. From my perspective, Apple stands still and keeps focussing on making devices thinner and a higher performance. Both are of no interest for me and certainly no reason to buy Apple. At the same time, competitors deliver more innovation like better camera’s, folding devices etc. This means I start looking elsewhere as Apple brings nothing to the table.

bala1234

indieshack said:

Suggestion for Apple: don’t talk about AI plans, first enact them then surprise us all with a beta release. Last year’s WWDC AI announcements looked like vaporware. Just do it.

In other words do the typical Apple thing rather than announcing before the products/services are really available.