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Apple just gave its AI a big upgrade. On Wednesday (Dec. 11), iOS 18.2 dropped, and ChatGPT is now part of the mix, thanks to OpenAI’s festive 12-day celebration. This means Siri got a major boost with advanced text and vision capabilities, all accessible right from the Siri interface.
During the launch demo, they leaned into the holiday vibe with festive sweaters and gift-giving with Apple on a live stream, highlighting how closely ChatGPT and Apple Intelligence are working together. OpenAI’s models are not only making Siri sharper but also powering a bunch of the new features Apple rolled out that same day.
ChatGPT is now integrated into Apple experiences within iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, allowing users to access ChatGPT’s capabilities right within the OS. pic.twitter.com/LLf4YZfRae
— OpenAI (@OpenAI) December 11, 2024
Unfortunately, while OpenAI was busy celebrating its big Apple integration, things hit a bit of a snag on day five. As ReadWrite reported, ChatGPT experienced a significant outage, which meant that if you tried to use ChatGPT, Sora, APIs, or even DALL-E right after the announcement, you probably ran into error messages or those “currently unavailable” screens. At the time of writing, however, everything’s back up and running.
How is ChatGPT powering Apple Intelligence in Siri?
Apple is positioning its Apple Intelligence as a way to make your devices more creative and intuitive, improving how you use apps and tools across your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. Siri, which gets a major upgrade with ChatGPT integration, is taking the voice assistant to a whole new level.
It can now handle complex questions with natural, fluid responses instead of short, robotic answers. You can ask detailed, nuanced questions and get thoughtful, context-aware answers that feel more human.
Siri with ChatGPT pic.twitter.com/Hpm8ct6y0Q
— OpenAI (@OpenAI) December 11, 2024
During the launch demo, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, product team member Miqdad Jaffer, and engineering manager Dave Cummings showed off these capabilities. For example, they had Siri use ChatGPT to review documents and answer related questions—answers that came directly from Apple’s assistant.
They also demonstrated how you can seamlessly send information to ChatGPT for deeper analysis, and how Siri can now open tools like Canvas and DALL-E. In one particular moment, Siri reviewed the latest ChatGPT model card, discussed its coding abilities, and then sent the response to the ChatGPT app to code a program visualizing those abilities.
ChatGPT will now also work with Siri on the iPhone 16 and 15 Pro, stepping in automatically whenever your query needs a little extra AI-powered reasoning. On iPhone 16 models, Visual Intelligence takes things up a notch by using ChatGPT to analyze and offer insights on images—like in their fun demo of a Christmas sweater contest.
AI writing tools
The integration also powers systemwide Writing Tools, letting you create content and generate images with ChatGPT right inside Apple apps. You don’t need a ChatGPT account to use these features. Plus, Apple’s built-in privacy protections ensure your data stays safe, with no storage or IP tracking involved.
Compose with ChatGPT pic.twitter.com/Njc5qRsh7C
— OpenAI (@OpenAI) December 11, 2024
While the buzz around this collaboration between Apple and OpenAI was hotter over the summer, this rollout might just reignite excitement. With Apple Intelligence’s earlier reception being somewhat underwhelming, this could be the spark Siri needs to compete with other rapidly evolving voice assistants.
Featured image: OpenAI via X
