If you’ve had enough of Siri not giving you a straight answer to a query and instead telling you that it found three websites and one of them might contain the answer to your question, hold on. Better days for Siri are coming. If you’ve installed the
iOS 18.1 Developer Beta on your
iPhone 15 Pro or
iPhone 15 Pro Max and are running the Apple Intelligence Beta, you might be asking yourself what is the big deal about AI-enhanced Siri. After all, the only changes to the virtual assistant in the
iOS 18.1 Beta are cosmetic.
So far all we’ve seen from Siri in Apple Intelligence is a cosmetic change to UI and a conversational tone
Sure, the glowing lights around the edges of the iPhone when Siri is summoned look cool, and Siri’s more conversational tone is also a nice improvement. But ask Siri which iPhone was the first to come with Siri and you are given three websites to look through. Ask Gemini Advanced, the AI-powered replacement for Google Assistant on the Pixel series, and you get one correct response: “The first phone with Siri was the iPhone 4S released in 2011.”
Ask Siri a question and you get three websites to go through. Ask Gemini Advanced and get a single, correct answer. | Image credit-PhoneArena
Siri will not show any improvements until the end of this year
when ChatGPT integration is added to Siri for iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max users. It hasn’t appeared in the
iOS 18.1 Developer Beta although it could still show up in the stable version of
iOS 18.1 (expected in October) or
iOS 18.2 (expected in December). With ChatGPT on board, if Siri can’t answer a query, instead of sending you to the three websites it pushes you to read, Siri will turn to ChatGPT to provide you with a useful straight answer.
Before Siri passes along a request for information from ChatGPT, you’ll be asked to give it permission to do so first.
While Apple Intelligence includes Writing Tools that allow you to change the tone of an email or text before you send it, or have AI proofread your missive, you won’t be able to create an email or text for a certain occasion until ChatGPT arrives. Once that happens, you’ll be able to ask it to write a letter or create an email asking your landlord to fix a leak. You’ll also be able to create a letter or email complaining to your carrier explaining that you never gave permission for a rep to add a new line to your account. Image generation will also be possible on ChatGPT.
Image generation using AI can be pretty cool as these images show
The downside here for iPhone users is that if they want the useful version of Siri that won’t make them look through three websites to find the answer to a query, they have to own the
iPhone 15 Pro,
iPhone 15 Pro Max, or the upcoming
iPhone 16 series. And the latest rumor heard around the water cooler (if that water cooler is located at Mark Gurman’s office at Bloomberg) is that the
iPhone SE 4 will carry 8GB RAM,
enough for it to support Apple Intelligence.
Will we see a big year for iPhone 16 shipments as iPhone users around the world upgrade in order to use the AI features offered with Apple Intelligence.
