The iOS 18.2 developer beta puts ChatGPT access right inside the operating system. Apple Intelligence’s official launch is less than a week away, but it’s the next wave of AI updates that will start to make Siri a lot more useful. The forthcoming iOS 18.2 update — now available as a developer beta — starts to make your phone a lot smarter with the addition if Visual Intelligence and the ability to pass Siri requests along 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 ChatGPT that for you” machine, with all that entails: good, bad, and everything in between.
By default, Siri will ask for confirmation every time it wants to pass on a request to ChatGPT. This makes a lot of sense, and I thought I’d prefer that behavior. But after an afternoon using it, I realized I just wanted to get to the ChatGPT answer faster and turned it off. Siri still handles basic questions on its own and doesn’t pass things like “When is the US election?” to ChatGPT, thankfully. And it will still just Google something for you when that’s the best way to get to your answer. But more complex stuff goes to ChatGPT, which means Siri can handle a lot more stuff than I’m used to throwing at it. Ask it “What are some cocktails I can make with whiskey and lemon juice?” and you’ll get a short list of options with descriptions. Old Siri will basically just show you a Google search snippet.
AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini regularly get things wrong and make things up. But I’ve started using them more and more as a starting point when I need help with something and I’m basically clueless. I actually downloaded Gemini (by way of Google’s iOS app) to the iPhone 16 I’ve been using because I got tired of opening it in a browser. As long as you don’t blindly trust what the AI tells you, it’s a handy way to get pointed in the right direction. Apple has put some nice privacy protections around your use of ChatGPT. OpenAI is “required to process your request solely for the purpose of fulfilling it and does not store your request or any responses it provides,” Apple states. The information won’t be used to train AI models, either. If you sign in to your OpenAI account, your requests are saved in your ChatGPT history and all of OpenAI’s terms apply. But you don’t need an OpenAI account at all if you don’t want or have one. I appreciate that.
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