Apple plans to introduce a significant change to its artificial intelligence array, with a completely revamped version of the Siri voice assistant at the center of the update. According to a report by Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, the long-awaited change will be officially unveiled during the company's annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) to be held this coming June. This relaunch is seen in the industry as the tech giant's major opportunity to re-establish its relevance in the AI field, where it has lagged behind compared to competitors. As part of the marketing and advocacy efforts for the move, Apple executives are expected to argue that they are taking a far more user-friendly and privacy-preserving approach than most artificial intelligence companies currently operating in the market.
Within the framework of the upgrade, Apple is expected to launch Siri for the first time as a standalone application, which will be powered by the Google Gemini model and offer users a chatbot experience reminiscent of the popular ChatGPT. However, compared to competing chatbots on the market, Apple's new application is expected to include far stricter limitations regarding the duration of time that users' information will be retained and permitted for use.
One of the central features expected to be included in the new update will allow users to actively manage their conversation history, similar to the mechanism currently existing in the company's Messages application. The system will allow conversations to be deleted completely automatically after a period of 30 days or after a full year, while alongside this, the option to save the content of the conversations indefinitely will remain, depending on the user's choice.
Alongside the promises on data protection, the report raises questions regarding the true motives behind the current move. Gurman estimates that the excessive emphasis Apple places on the privacy issue may serve as an excuse or a cover-up for Siri's shortcomings compared to competing products in the market. Furthermore, Apple's focus on privacy could obscure the fact that Google is the one actually handling some of the security matters of the new system.