Siri's big ChatGPT upgrade hits iPhone with iOS 18.2

The official launch of Apple Intelligence is less than a week away, but it's the next wave of AI updates that will make Siri much more useful.

The upcoming iOS 18.2 update – now available as a developer beta – makes your phone significantly smarter with the addition of visual intelligence and the ability to route Siri requests 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 chat this for you” machine with all that entails: good, bad and everything in between.

By default, Siri asks for confirmation each time it wants to forward a request to ChatGPT. This makes a lot of sense and I thought I would prefer this behavior. But after using it for an afternoon, I realized I just wanted to get to the ChatGPT response faster, so I turned it off. Siri still answers basic questions on its own and doesn't answer questions like “When are the US elections?” Luckily for ChatGPT. And there's still some Googling for you if that's the best way to get to your answer.

However, more complex things go to ChatGPT, meaning Siri can handle a lot more things than I'm used to. Ask, “What cocktails can I make with whiskey and lemon juice?” and you’ll get a short list of options with descriptions. Old Siri basically just shows you a Google search snippet.

AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Google's Gemini regularly make mistakes and make things up. But I'm using it more and more as a starting point when I need help with something and basically have no idea. I actually downloaded Gemini (via Google's iOS app) on the iPhone 16 I was using because I got tired of opening it in a browser. As long as you don't blindly trust what the AI ​​tells you, this is a practical way to point you in the right direction.

Apple has introduced some nice privacy measures around your use of ChatGPT. OpenAI is “committed to processing your request solely for the purpose of fulfilling it and does not store your request or the responses it provides,” Apple explains. The information is also not used to train AI models. When you log in to your OpenAI account, your requests will be saved to your ChatGPT history and all OpenAI terms and conditions apply. However, you don't need an OpenAI account at all if you don't want or don't have one. I appreciate that.

iPhone 16 owners also have another way to take advantage of ChatGPT's smarts: Visual Intelligence, which is also enabled in 18.2. Accessed by holding down the camera control button, which brings up a live camera view. Once you've taken a photo, you can let ChatGPT analyze it or use Google Image Search to find similar results across the web. It's a beautified, iOS-compliant Google Lens, and it's about time iPhones had something like that built in. Siri used to be able to search for plants, landmarks, and the like, but nothing was as comprehensive as this.

Visual intelligence is pretty good – for the most part. It was very flattering in his descriptions of various locations around my house, describing my entryway as “cozy” and “well organized” and our whiskey collection as “impressive.” A decent list of cocktails was created based on a picture of my home bar, and with a picture of the problem I was able to guide a home repair in the right direction. As long as you consider the answer as a starting point, AI is very handy for such low-stakes questions.

But all the known pitfalls of AI chatbots are there, which Apple warns you about every time you interact with ChatGPT. I asked him to explain the joke in one Garfield To me, it was a comic, and it completely invented details that weren't there (although to be fair, the joke it invented was funnier than the actual source material). I asked about the books on my shelf and hallucinated some titles that are definitely not on that shelf.

I also wish ChatGPT would allow you to check its work the way Gemini does. Google's AI chatbot provides obvious links to articles on the topics it references, so you know where to read more and check what the AI ​​is telling you. ChatGPT mentions in the fine print the number of sources it used to create your reply for Siri, and you have to tap on them to see links to those articles.

Still, it's a step forward in the things you've come to expect from Siri. And it's something that people don'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 speech understanding. But basically it's the same old Siri.

That's starting to change in 18.2, and Apple's AI ambitions are even bigger than “Ask ChatGPT.” Eventually, Siri will be able to do things for you in apps – the full promise of AI on our phones, so to speak. But such updates probably won't be available until 2025.

Of all the Apple Intelligence features I've used so far, the ChatGPT integration seems to be the one I'll use the most; Just like Gemini allows me to use the Google Assistant for more things, more often. It's not always right, but as a tool to help me find the right answer, it's pretty smart.