Apple Will Revamp Siri to Catch Up to Its Chatbot Competitors
Apple plans to announce that it will bring generative A.I. to iPhones after the company’s most significant reorganization in a decade.
Tripp Mickle, Brian X. Chen and Cade Metz have been reporting on Apple’s plans for generative A.I. for this article since the fall of 2023.
Apple’s top software executives decided early last year that Siri, the company’s virtual assistant, needed a brain transplant.
The decision came after the executives Craig Federighi and John Giannandrea spent weeks testing OpenAI’s new chatbot, ChatGPT. The product’s use of generative artificial intelligence, which can write poetry, create computer code and answer complex questions, made Siri look antiquated, said two people familiar with the company’s work, who didn’t have permission to speak publicly.
Introduced in 2011 as the original virtual assistant in every iPhone, Siri had been limited for years to individual requests and had never been able to follow a conversation. It often misunderstood questions. ChatGPT, on the other hand, knew that if someone asked for the weather in San Francisco and then said, “What about New York?” that user wanted another forecast.
