Siri's Major ChatGPT-Style Upgrade Arrives — With Mixed Results

The recent upgrade to Siri, incorporating generative chatbot technologies akin to ChatGPT, has yielded mixed results, showcasing both advancements and significant shortcomings. This upgrade leverages a low-resource adaptation framework that enables efficient deployment on user devices while maintaining conversational quality . These improvements have enabled Siri to generate more contextually relevant responses and manage complex queries better than before. However, the challenges associated with voice interaction remain evident.

Although the iOS 18.1 release is highly anticipated, it’s the developer beta of iOS 18.2—set to be the next update unless there are bug fixes that are needed in the meantime—that will likely cause more excitement as it has a lot of new features.

By default, Siri will ask for confirmation every time it wants to pass on a request to ChatGPT. This makes a lot of sense, and I thought I’d prefer that behavior. But after an afternoon using it, I realized I just wanted to get to the ChatGPT answer faster and turned it off. Siri still handles basic questions on its own and doesn’t pass things like “When is the US election?” to ChatGPT, thankfully. And it will still just Google something for you when that’s the best way to get to your answer.

But more complex stuff goes to ChatGPT, which means Siri can handle a lot more stuff than I’m used to throwing at it. Ask it “What are some cocktails I can make with whiskey and lemon juice?” and you’ll get a short list of options with descriptions. Old Siri will basically just show you a Google search snippet.

Apple says it will be transparent about when it’s using your data. It will provide a detailed report on your device, called the Apple Intelligence Report, showing how each of your Siri requests was processed, so you can see for yourself what data was used and where it went.

That said, AI requires vast amounts of information to operate, and to power these features, Apple needs access to more of your data. “Apple will be able to read your messages, monitor your calendar, track your Maps and location, record your phone calls, view your photos and understand any other personal information,” says Jake Moore, global cybersecurity advisor at security firm ESET.

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Sarah H

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