In a surprising twist to the usual Apple Vs Android rivalry, it's been announced that Siri might soon be able to ask Google Gemini for help with your queries if it needs some back-up.
At WWDC 2024 Apple Announced its new approach to Artificial Intelligence – or Apple Intelligence as it wants AI to now be known – and Siri got a bunch of improvements, such as the ability to generate custom emojis, summarize long emails, and help you edit photos.
Fairly standard stuff then. However, one interesting extra detail is that Siri can pass your queries over to another chatbot if it thinks that service could do a better job.
Currently, the only AI Siri will turn to is ChatGPT; however during the keynote it was revealed that other AI would be added in the future, and following the showcase Apple's Craig Federighi name-dropped Gemini as one AI that Apple would like to integrate, before adding that Apple had "nothing to announce right now, but that’s our general direction."
Gemini certainly makes sense, as it's a serious alternative to ChatGPT, but considering that Gemini is set to be a major feature of Android devices, we’re a little surprised it’s being shared with iPhones – we're not complaining though.
Gemini and ChatGPT have been trading blows in recent months, and this addition is less of an improvement to the AI-enhanced Siri, and more about giving you 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 it will only share the data relevant to your query. If you don't want to share your data with either OpenAI or Google you can turn the feature off, or reject Siri’s request to use those AIs.
Apple's approach to privacy, and in particularly about being transparent with how it handles your data, does seem to be the feature of its AI services that it most wants to highlight. It’s boasting about private servers, and saying 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 precisely how it all works until we see how the new Siri works in practice. It's currently missing from the iOS 18 beta, but hopefully we'll get the chance to try it out soon.
