- Apple executives Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak have explained how the company’s approach to AI differs from that of its rivals.
- This includes Siri AI not being interested in “flattery” or being a “romantic partner.”
- They also highlight how Siri AI doesn’t require you to be a “quick expert” but does respect your privacy.
It’s been a long wait, but Apple’s AI vision is almost here. The company’s revamped Siri voice assistant, Siri AI, is a key component of iOS 27, which is due out later this year and is currently in beta. But if Apple is to be believed, Siri AI won’t just be a ChatGPT or Gemini clone with Siri’s voice.
In an interview with Mostly Human, via MacRumors, Apple’s head of software engineering, Craig Federighi, and head of marketing, Greg Joswiak, discussed the company’s approach to AI and highlighted three ways the new Siri differs from competing chatbots.
The most striking statements relate to how Siri AI communicates with you and, specifically, that it won’t act as an AI boyfriend or girlfriend to anyone. Federighi argued that “if you use a lot of the existing chatbots, they actually focus a lot on engagement. And flattery, right? They kind of want to draw you in. They might encourage you to reveal things about yourself and then use that as a basis for establishing a connection.”
While no names are mentioned, this is a clear dig at AI rivals like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok, who, to varying degrees, enable this strange relationship building. In fact, we’ve heard of people falling in love with ChatGPT, using chatbots as therapists, and even more alarmingly, as many as 26% of Gen Z have dated an AI.
With Siri, however, apparently none of this will be possible, and Federighi goes on to say that “the way we’ve designed Siri, Siri really wants to say, ‘Listen, I’m not here for that, right? I’m here to help you. I can help you do things. I can help you learn about the world.'” But if you try to involve Siri as a romantic partner, Siri isn’t ready for that. “Siri doesn’t like that 100%.”
Simple, useful and preserves your privacy.
However, that’s not the only way Siri apparently differs, or the only subtle hint Apple makes here about rival platforms.
Another is in Joswiak’s statement that he doesn’t want iPhone users to have to become “quick experts,” which seems like a dig at the need to design complex messages to maximize the potential of other AIs.
He added that “we don’t do AI for the sake of it. ‘Hey, look at us, we’re doing AI.’ It’s ‘How does AI make everything better?’ And that makes our products and our features better.” Which is perhaps not so much a response to ChatGPT and Gemini as it is to the fact that AI is increasingly being inserted into almost every program we use, whether it’s actually beneficial or not.
And while some other AIs can collect an alarming amount of data about you and share it with their parent companies (even going so far, in Gemini’s case, as to not allowing you to save conversation histories if you don’t consent to Google employees being able to view your chats and use them to train models), Apple claims to be taking a privacy-first approach.
On that point, Federighi said: “I think it’s a challenge for a lot of people to understand the distinction between what your iPhone knows and what, say, Apple as a company knows. Your iPhone is yours, right? Your data is yours and it stays on your phone, and [under] your controller and Siri is using it for you. Apple doesn’t know anything about this, and that is very different [from what] I think most of the players in the space [are doing]and I think it is very important.”
So while Siri is certainly late to the AI party, it could have some real advantages over rival services, although it remains to be seen how good (and how faithful to these principles) it will be in practice.
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