With less than a week until the official release of Apple Intelligence, the next wave of AI updates will start to make Siri even more useful.
The upcoming iOS 18.2 update (currently available as a developer beta) will make your phone smarter with added visual intelligence and the ability to pass Siri requests to ChatGPT. On phones that support Apple Intelligence, Siri is more than just a “look it up on Google” machine. Now it’s a “let me ChatGPT it” machine, with the good, the bad, and everything in between.
By default, Siri asks for confirmation each time it passes a request to ChatGPT. I thought this made a lot of sense and I prefer that behavior. But after using it for an afternoon, I realized I just wanted to access ChatGPT’s answers faster, so I turned it off. Siri still handles basic questions on its own and won’t answer questions like “When are the US elections?” Thank you ChatGPT. And if that’s the best way to get to the answer, just search for something on Google.
However, more complex processing is sent to ChatGPT. That means Siri can do a lot more than I’m used to. Ask, “What cocktail can I make with whiskey and lemon juice?” A short list of options with descriptions will be displayed. Old Siri basically just displays Google search snippets.
AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini often get things wrong or make things up. But I’ve started using them more and more as a starting point when I need help with something and am basically clueless. In fact, I downloaded Gemini (via Google’s iOS app) to my old iPhone 16 because I got tired of opening it in a browser. As long as you don’t blindly trust what the AI says, it’s a useful way to point you in the right direction.
Apple has some great privacy protections in place regarding the use of ChatGPT. OpenAI “must process requests only for the purpose of fulfilling them, and does not store the requests or the responses provided,” Apple said. This information is also not used to train AI models. Once you sign in to your OpenAI account, your request will be saved in your ChatGPT history and all OpenAI terms will apply. However, if you don’t need or don’t have an OpenAI account, you don’t need one at all. Thank you very much.
Beautiful Google Lens for iOS
iPhone 16 owners will also have another way to take advantage of ChatGPT’s features. Visual Intelligence is also enabled in 18.2. Accessible by holding down the camera control button, it displays a live view of the camera. Once you’ve taken a photo, you can analyze it with ChatGPT or use Google Image Search to find similar results on the web. This is a glorified, iOS-ized Google Lens, and it’s about time iPhones had something like this. Siri used to be able to look up things like plants and landmarks, but never this extensively.
Visual intelligence is pretty good most of the time. it was very They compliment me with descriptions of the various locations around my house, calling my entryway “cosy” and “well-organized” and calling my whiskey collection “impressive.” A good list of cocktails to make was created based on the photos of my home bar, and I was able to use the photos in question to move my home repairs in the right direction. AI is very useful for these types of low-stakes questions, as long as you treat the answer as a starting point.
However, all the common pitfalls of AI chatbots are present, and Apple warns you every time you interact with ChatGPT. I asked him to explain the joke. garfield To me it was like a cartoon, with details that weren’t there completely made up (although to be fair the jokes they came up with were funnier than the actual original). When I asked about the books on my bookshelf, I hallucinated some titles that were definitely not on that shelf.
I also wish ChatGPT could check its behavior like Gemini does. Google’s AI chatbot provides clear links to articles on the topic you’re reading, so you know where to go to read more or double-check what the AI is saying. . ChatGPT lists in small print the number of sources it pulled for answers to Siri, and you must tap to see links to those articles.
Still, this is a quantum leap forward in terms of what you can expect from Siri. And this is what people don’t see when they download Apple Intelligence. In iOS 18.1, Siri has a new look with glowing borders, a new text interface, and improved language understanding. But it’s basically the same as old Siri.
That starts to change with 18.2, and Apple’s AI ambitions are much bigger than “Ask ChatGPT.” Eventually, Siri will be able to perform actions on your behalf within your app. This is like the promise of AI in mobile phones. However, such an update is likely to arrive in 2025.
Of all the Apple Intelligence features I’ve used, I feel like the ChatGPT integration is the one I use the most. Just like Gemini allows you to use Google Assistant for more things and more often. It’s not always correct, but it’s a very clever tool for arriving at the right answer.
