ChatGPT integrated into Siri is embarrassingly bad
Remember Apple Intelligence at WWDC 2024?
September 19, 2026
Updated 9/20/2026 after getting access to Siri AI, update at the bottom after original text.
In June 2024 Apple demoed its new AI suite Apple Intelligence. Part of that was Siri that actually... understood things. The world was pretty familiar with LLMs and AI in 2024, and Apple knew Siri wasn't good enough.
Fast forward to September 2026 and Apple has once again demoed Siri AI and this time its coming out, for real this time! Unfortunately at the time of the iPhone 18 Pro release its still locked behind a hard to find waitlist opt-in, which I assume its for capacity management and safety.
So while we wait for that, iOS 27 has deepened its integration with ChatGPT and essentially pushed it as an option for users. It was available from iOS 18.2 onward, but now it's front and center with the revamped Siri UI. So while we wait for "Siri AI" we can ask Siri to "Ask ChatGPT" whatever our queries are. Spoilers: it's still awful.
Whichever OpenAI model they're using is clearly pretty light weight without much if any reasoning. They've clearly optimized for quick responses, but unfortunately the results are quite bad.
Via Carplay we asked it a question, trivia about an episode of the Simpsons. It hallucinated a scene that doesn't exist in an episode. Confused, because we knew the classic season 3 episode it mentioned. After verifying that we were correct on the Simpsons Wiki, we asked the question again in a slightly different way it confidently gave us the same incorrect answer, even with an "are you sure?". FWIW Gemini in Google Search gets this correct.
Ok so maybe general knowledge isn't a good use case. So I asked it about the presence of an Apple Store at a mall. It said that yes, that particular mall had an Apple Store. Spoiler it doesn't. Gemini in Google Search also gets this correct.
We tried a few more things about not so recent real world events and it consistently got them wrong. Amusingly every ChatGPT reply Siri makes has a caveat to not trust it at the end. In our testing this is correct. This is AI at its worst.
Smaller models can be ok at general knowledge questions, but they need tool bounding to provide real data from trusted sources. Look at how good Gemini results in Google Search have become. They were awful when Google launched it, but now they respond immediately and quite accurate. Given how prominent the Siri ChatGPT integration is, Apple really needs to do better. Hopefully Siri AI finally delivers on their 2024 promises.
UPDATE! 9/20/2026 - just about 52 hours after setting up my phone both Eva and I got "accepted" into the Siri AI beta. Early usage, it's quite good! Much better than Siri ChatGPT, which I have since disabled. Siri AI is conversational and much more accurate, we tested all the same knowledge questions with great accuracy and much more verbose answers. Siri AI also claims Apple has a zero retention policy on queries, even for potential safety issues. Curious to learn more but I am so far happy!