(REUTERS) Apple on Monday rolled out a long-delayed overhaul of its Siri voice assistant, in a bid to close the gap with Big Tech rivals and new-age startups in the AI race.
During its Worldwide Developers Conference in California, the iPhone maker introduced Siri AI.
It's a more conversational assistant with a standalone app and the ability to analyze what is on a user’s screen.
It can also pull in information from the web.
Here's Mike Rockwell, Apple's Vice President of Siri Engineering.
"Siri AI uses our new Apple Intelligence capabilities. This includes personal context understanding, app actions, on screen awareness, image understanding, and access to broad world knowledge."
"Let's start with something simple, but super useful. 'Where is this exactly?' Here, Siri can identify the location of this beautiful shot along the Santa Cruz coast. Oh cool, Natural Bridges State Beach."
The update comes two years after Apple first promised major upgrades, only to see them repeatedly delayed.
Now the changes mark the company's most significant attempt yet to revive Siri, which has struggled to keep pace with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini.
One analyst said the challenge for the iPhone maker is to convince consumers that "intelligence does not have to come at the expense of privacy."
Apple is leaning on Google’s Gemini technology and Nvidia chips to power its AI push.
But it stressed that personal data would remain private, with most processing done on users' devices or through its own system, which is designed to shield data from outside access.
Monday's announcement got a mixed welcome from analysts, with one calling Siri AI "credible" but not "earth-shaking".
Posted by: Alma Angeles/NET25 News
