iOS 18 Reportedly Won't Feature Apple's Own ChatGPT-Like Chatbot

[Surf Monkey]

Don’t get your hopes up. Apple let Siri languish for over 10 years, probably because it can’t be monetized. They’ve never seen the reason to work hard at it.
I am trying to temper my hopes.

As I understand it from reading various articles over the years, Siri was not easily expandable. The code needed to be rewritten from the ground up to achieve much more than what we see today. Of course this begs the question: why wasn’t Apple working on exactly that a decade ago?

Honestly, this looks like another case of lack of leadership. Someone needed to put their foot down. No one did. Siri languished until it became a liability.

 

[lfaa]

Apple is a couple years behind the leaders. They are literally starting to buy server hardware this year, so any kind of in-house chatbot or real integration is out of the question or would end up like iOS 6 Maps. The real question is if Apple can catch up by WWDC ‘26.

All this hardware to make Siri better at understanding basic stuff people don’t want to do themselves like finding the right song in Music ( you know that live version not the studio one) . 😆

 

[RezSeeker]

What good does anyone know or can anyone tell about this bozo with "impressive" credentials?
(in case you're not familiar with bozos read about Steve Jobs history with them).

Apple Leadership - John Giannandrea

John Giannandrea is Apple’s senior vice president of Machine Learning and AI Strategy and a member of Apple’s executive team. Learn more about John.

www.apple.com

Lost in the woods

 

[Johnstrass2]

I couldn’t care less about having a chatbot, but I would welcome Siri getting better at understanding what I’m asking for and being able to actually remember context. Asking for specific music is such a chore when artists spell their names or song/album titles weird, have live versions, etc.

Im a Fanboy for Apple. However, I can't believe every Tim eI wean directions to my favorite gym (part fo a chain) Apple Maps does not know that I have aved on in favorites and just I MIGHt want to go to the one .... Google maps still rules

 

[HMI]

I feel lied to!

 

[madebybela]

Apple outsourcing the AI tech is a good move so they won’t have much loss when they inevitably deprecate these features in iOS 20

 

[TVreporter]

Ha she thought. Siri seems less capable now than it did like 7 years ago. Sure doesn’t accomplish my HomeKit commands like it did years ago.

Absolutely true for HomeKit - repeated requests for tasks that used to be done instantly

I can’t even ask Siri who scores the goals in a hockey game anymore like it used to do. Now it’s “I can show you the web results.”

Meanwhile my kid’s Google Mini can nearly have full chats over any topic.

 

[Tagbert]

Im a Fanboy for Apple. However, I can't believe every Tim eI wean directions to my favorite gym (part fo a chain) Apple Maps does not know that I have aved on in favorites and just I MIGHt want to go to the one .... Google maps still rules

What!!?

 

[Le0M]

The possibility to ask trivia question is THE ONLY feature I'd use.
If that doesn't become a reality it'll be a shame.

 

[netflixobama]

AI is way bigger than generative chat bots. Apple's been on the right path of machine learning this whole time. I hope they don't get too distracted by generative AI chat bots, even though they're the flavour of the week.
The Memories feature in photos is fantastic. It's the perfect solution to having tens of thousands of photos.
Spotlight search functions are great, extremely reliable across all devices and services.
The suggested functions, autocomplete, smart stack, etc. are all really good as well, almost always have it spot on.
And best of all it's local, which makes it quick, secure and private.

There are definitely some improvements. Especially on the Watch with auto start, pause, resume and ending workouts. How hard would it be to know when you arrive at your work that maybe your walking workout is complete?

Of course Siri is terrible, and much worse than it used to be. It used to even prioritise people you often speak to, now it has no idea and suggests people you haven't spoken to in years. I wonder if running the requests, and her responses, through a generative AI would do the trick. Keep the core functionality, but have some AI interpretation on either side.

 

[Applɘ Aꙅylum]

Google chatgpt within the famous Walled Garden??


That gonna be an odd partnership.

 

[chfilm]

To anyone who’s used chatGPT in voice mode, it becomes apparent the yet unrealized potential of Siri that was introduced a decade ago. You can have a casual, natural language conversation with a human-like assistant with access to all the information of the internet at your own pace. It’s extremely powerful but chatGPt doesn’t have access to your Apple apps like your calendar, to do list, contacts, etc. Having something like this embedded within iOS is going to be transformational.

I once had an hours long session planning a complex trip with several stops and many different possibilities. I left chatGPT open on my kitchen table and just spoke normally when ideas came to me without having to prompt it:
“how about Lisbon?”.
ChatGPT: “Lisbon is in your travel route but it’ll be colder that time of the year.”

It remembered our entire conversation, what preferences I had settled on (wanted it to be warm) and by the end of the session, I had my entire trip planned, without once going on a single website.

I’d like to see how Apple implements privacy as I wouldn’t want Google through Gemini to have access to my Apple ecosystem data.

100% this! I had an hour long discussion with chat gpt about how to do some changes with my bank account setup. If they gave it Siri’s voice and let it access your mails and calendar and even other apps.. it’ll feel like a new kind of device.

 

[svish]

Too quick for Apple to develop something on their own. A partnership with Google and OpenAI will have to do for now.

 

[philstubbington]

To anyone who’s used chatGPT in voice mode, it becomes apparent the yet unrealized potential of Siri that was introduced a decade ago. You can have a casual, natural language conversation with a human-like assistant with access to all the information of the internet at your own pace. It’s extremely powerful but chatGPt doesn’t have access to your Apple apps like your calendar, to do list, contacts, etc. Having something like this embedded within iOS is going to be transformational.

I once had an hours long session planning a complex trip with several stops and many different possibilities. I left chatGPT open on my kitchen table and just spoke normally when ideas came to me without having to prompt it:
“how about Lisbon?”.
ChatGPT: “Lisbon is in your travel route but it’ll be colder that time of the year.”

It remembered our entire conversation, what preferences I had settled on (wanted it to be warm) and by the end of the session, I had my entire trip planned, without once going on a single website.

I’d like to see how Apple implements privacy as I wouldn’t want Google through Gemini to have access to my Apple ecosystem data.

I worked on a project in 1996 using speaker independent voice recognition and it was remarkably good. Nearly 30 years later and…..

 

[giebe]

Don't need another chatbot. Just integrate AI in daily usage. Photo Editing, Text writing in Notes or Mail, Summaries of documents or Mails, smart photo library, AI Siri, Translation of scribbles to proper drawings in freeform, better music recommendations, smart file cleanup on Macs, summarize voice messages, searchable collection of book highlights, summarize books, Xcode dev support, AI calendar organization. People need to feel the improvements in daily life and don't sit in front of an input field.

 

[aknabi]

Seems that in the past ~12 years the way to view upcoming Apple releases is to take whatever folks are expecting and expect less... way less.

Apple Silicon was the shinning exception to this (thank your favorite deity).

 

[aknabi]

What good does anyone know or can anyone tell about this bozo with "impressive" credentials?
(in case you're not familiar with bozos read about Steve Jobs history with them).

Apple Leadership - John Giannandrea

John Giannandrea is Apple’s senior vice president of Machine Learning and AI Strategy and a member of Apple’s executive team. Learn more about John.

www.apple.com

Good point... a number of old timer friends have left in the past 5 years (with none left)... the primary reason being they got tired of the "bozonification" occurring with Apple... and that the increase in bozos has dramatically increase the political maneuvering and gaming... it's always been the case to some extent, but now it materially impacts people doing their best work and creating great products (being good people they don't elaborate beyond that so no real insight here).

Of course it's not a large number of data points and Apple is a very different company with different requirements for growth.

 

[wanha]

It's not shocking at all that Apple would not want to open up to just everyone a "Generative AI chatbot" because you can't really control what info it's going to provide and that's just not Apple. It's too risky. You don't want a chatbot that's not 100% in Apple's control to provide text that could get people in trouble - or Apple in trouble.

I 100% expect iOS 18 to provide a ton of generative capabilities - like suggestions to write/design/create things, but just not a chat.

I think this is very good take. Apple want to control the user experience; this becomes a problem with generative AI which by definition is so wide that it will be impossible to have tight control of the quality of responses.

This may be an area where Apple's conservative culture works against it.

A Google or Samsung couldn't care less if their AI is imperfect, as their only objective is to create sales by adding exciting, new features, no matter how half baked they might be. They'll figure the rest out as they go along.

Both approaches have their pros and cons.

 

[wanha]

What I want: AI in select places that make the phone more useful, easier, and fun to use.

What I don't want: a phone wide AI assistant that is created and controlled by an American corporation that is programmed to play moral police with its users. This applies to ChatGPT and Google AI also.

Oh, and Baidu is probably even worse.

Give us decentralized AI and let us do what we want/need with it rather than treating us as children.

/end of rant

 

[Rychiar]

What!!?

Siri musta transcribed that

 

[Onelifenofear]

So the problem with GENERAL Chat Ai’s like ChatGPT and Gemini is that a lot of the time they just makes something up completely or get it completly wrong… Even if you ask the same question again the answer can be different. That is something Apple wouldn’t get involved with.

However a SPECIFIC AI Based on their own tools Will happen. Personally I hope it make apple home more intelligent. “Siri Turn the bedroom, office and driveway lights on, close the blinds halfway and put the kettle on” Or for setting up automations.

 

[krspkbl]

Apple got caught out and are playing catch up. They need to rely on Google/Microsoft to power their AI until they can build their own and even when it does come it's going to be years behind everyone else lol.

 

[krspkbl]

Don't need another chatbot. Just integrate AI in daily usage. Photo Editing, Text writing in Notes or Mail, Summaries of documents or Mails, smart photo library, AI Siri, Translation of scribbles to proper drawings in freeform, better music recommendations, smart file cleanup on Macs, summarize voice messages, searchable collection of book highlights, summarize books, Xcode dev support, AI calendar organization. People need to feel the improvements in daily life and don't sit in front of an input field.

Gemini/ChatGPT/Copilot are more than just a chatbot. They do a lot of the things you mentioned. Google is integrating Gemini into gmail, documents, etc. Copilot is taking over all of Microsoft's software products too.

A Chatbot is just one feature of a LLM. It'd be silly of Apple to not put it into Siri which is essentially a chatbot. Co-pilot is basically Cortana on steroids. The thing is Apple are still at the Cortana stage. They'll beef Siri up with AI.

 

[Steve121178]

At this point Apple would have been better off just buying OpenAI and integrating it. I am extremely disappointed.

As usual, Apple are too late for that. Microsoft are heavy investors & major partners of OpenAI.

 

[JippaLippa]

This thing is being a mess.
Super curious to see what's what, but I don't know how to set my expectations.