Siri’s big ChatGPT upgrade is here — for better and worse

We finally got a look at one of Siri’s big Apple Intelligence updates. | Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge

Apple Intelligence’s official launch is less than a week away, but it’s the next wave of AI updates that will start to make Siri a lot more useful.

The forthcoming iOS 18.2 update — now available as a developer beta — starts to make your phone a lot smarter with the addition of Visual Intelligence and the ability to pass Siri requests along to ChatGPT. On phones that support Apple Intelligence, Siri won’t just be a “let me Google that for you” machine; now it’s a “let me ChatGPT that for you” machine, with all that entails: good, bad, and everything in between.

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.

Siri in iOS 18.1 without ChatGPT just tells me to make a whiskey sour.

Siri with ChatGPT recommends a few options including a Gold Rush, which is the right answer if you ask me.

AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini regularly get things wrong and make things up. But I’ve started using them more and more as a starting point when I need help with something and I’m basically clueless. I actually downloaded Gemini (by way of Google’s iOS app) to the iPhone 16 I’ve been using because I got tired of opening it in a browser. As long as you don’t blindly trust what the AI tells you, it’s a handy way to get pointed in the right direction.

Apple has put some nice privacy protections around your use of ChatGPT. OpenAI is “required to process your request solely for the purpose of fulfilling it and does not store your request or any responses it provides,” Apple states. The information won’t be used to train AI models, either. If you sign in to your OpenAI account, your requests are saved in your ChatGPT history and all of OpenAI’s terms apply. But you don’t need an OpenAI account at all if you don’t want or have one. I appreciate that.

A glorified, iOS-ified Google Lens

iPhone 16 owners will have another way to tap into ChatGPT’s smarts, too: Visual Intelligence, which is also enabled in 18.2. It’s accessed by holding down the camera control button, which pulls up a camera live view. Once you take a photo, you can have ChatGPT analyze it or use Google Image search to find similar results on the web. It is a glorified, iOS-ified Google Lens, and it’s about time iPhones had something like this built in. Siri could previously look up plants and landmarks and the like, but nothing as expansive as this.

Visual Intelligence is pretty good — mostly. It was very flattering in its descriptions of various spots around my house, calling my entryway “cozy” and “well-organized,” and our whiskey collection “impressive.” It came up with a decent list of cocktails to make based on a picture of my home bar, and it got me started in the right direction on a home repair with a picture of the problem. As long as you treat the answer as a starting point, AI is pretty handy for these kinds of low stakes questions.

But all of the familiar pitfalls of AI chatbots are present, which Apple warns you about in every interaction you have with ChatGPT. I asked it to explain the joke in a Garfield comic strip to me, and it completely made up details that weren’t there (though to be fair, the joke it invented was funnier than the actual source material). I asked it about the books on my shelf and it hallucinated some titles that are definitely not on that shelf.

It starts off on the right track then veers into hallucination-land.

This is totally plausible but not at all what happens in this comic strip!

I also wish that ChatGPT would let you check its work the way that Gemini does. Google’s AI chatbot supplies obvious links to articles on the topics it references, so you know where to go to read more and double check what the AI is telling you. ChatGPT mentions in small print the number of sources it pulled from to come up with your answer for Siri, and you need to tap to see links to those articles.

Still, it’s a leap forward in the kinds of things you can expect Siri to do. And it’s one that people won’t see when they download Apple Intelligence; in iOS 18.1, Siri gets a new look with a glowing border, a new text interface, and improved language understanding. But it’s basically the same old Siri.

That starts to change in 18.2, and Apple’s AI ambitions are bigger still than “go ask ChatGPT.” Eventually, Siri will be able to take action for you in apps — kind of the whole promise of AI on our phones. But those kinds of updates likely won’t arrive until well into 2025.

Of all the Apple Intelligence features I’ve used so far, the ChatGPT integration feels like the one I’ll use the most; the same way that Gemini has me using Google’s assistant more often for more things. It’s not always right, but as a tool to help me get to the right answer, it’s pretty smart.

Posted from: this blog via Microsoft Power Automate.