A few weeks ago, Apple announced a partnership with OpenAI that brings ChatGPT access to Siri. At the same time, Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice-president of software engineering, confirmed plans to work with additional third-party models.
“We’re looking forward to doing integrations with other models, including Google Gemini, for instance, in the future,” Federighi said during a post-keynote conversation. But he quickly added that the company had “nothing to announce right now, but that’s our general direction”.
The “future” Craig pointed out appears to be not too far away. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in his Power On newsletter said that Apple will announce “at least” one other deal — to add Google Gemini, too — this fall.
Gemini being part of the upcoming iOS 18 chatbot rumour is not new. Anthropic too is a part of these rumours, and Gurman also suggests Apple could announce a deal with that company at some point, if not this fall. But Meta appears to have been rejected because its Llama chatbot just isn’t good enough.
ChatGPT, of course, will be the first third-party model to receive integration at some point later this year. According to the Tim Cook-led company, users will be able to access the system without having to sign up for an account or pay for premium services. As for that platform’s integration with Siri, Federighi confirmed that the voice assistant will alert a user before sending them off its own in-house models.
“Siri, it’s really important to understand, will ask you before you go to ChatGPT. Then you can have that conversation with ChatGPT. Then, if there’s any helpful data referenced in your question that you might want to supply to ChatGPT, we’re going to ask, ‘Do you want to send this photo?’ From a privacy point of view, you’re always in control and have total transparency,” Craig said.
Beyond chatbot integration comes Apple Intelligence, which ensures privacy is in your hands and it will make the usage of iPhones easier while dealing with daily tasks. For the time being, Apple Intelligence will only be available for the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, besides future generations of the iPhone.
