Siri may be in for a massive upgrade at WWDC 2024 — will it be enough?

Last year, we reported on Apple introducing AI elements to Siri, with the possibility of Apple GPT coming soon. It appears that "soon" could be this summer at the WWDC 2024 event.

According to a report from the Financial Times (via Tom's Guide), Apple has made more recent AI acquisitions than its competitors, including Google, Microsoft, and Meta, and the company has plans to acquire even more businesses in 2024. Additionally, almost half of all AI-related job ads Apple has posted are for generative AI-related roles.

Could Siri 2.0 actually be a competitive virtual assistant?

While Siri was innovative technology when it first launched, it was quickly surpassed by better virtual assistants, from Google Assistant to the now hard-to-top ChatGPT-powered assistants. In fact, many people last year were searching for how to replace Siri with ChatGPT.

Over the past few years, it has seemed like Apple simply isn't as interested in generative AI as Google, Microsoft, or Meta, but the company has just been silently acquiring and learning before jumping the gun. Apple CEO Tim Cook said, "We view AI and machine learning as fundamental technologies, and they're integral to virtually every product that we ship."

With Apple's slower, more methodical approach to generative AI, we can only hope that Siri 2.0 is an exceptional upgrade. Siri 2.0 will supposedly be a lot more conversational, and it'll be able to form intricate answers and understand complex questions. Furthermore, this upgraded virtual assistant will probably be better integrated among Apple's entire product range than the existing one.

Recently, the Apple research team introduced its own open-source, multimodal AI model, known as Ferret. This AI model lets large language models (LLMs) run on iPhones more efficiently. Analyst Daniel Ives told Financial Times that he'd be surprised if Apple "[didn't do a sizeable AI deal this year, because there's an arms race going on, and Apple is not going to be on the outside looking in."

With Siri claiming the title of "first virtual personal assistant," it'd be cool to see it become the best virtual assistant. The most likely place we could expect to see Siri 2.0 debut is at Apple's annual WWDC 2024 event.