The official launch of Apple Intelligence is less than a week away, but it’s the next wave of AI updates that will make Siri a lot more useful.

The upcoming iOS 18.2 update – now available in developer beta – starts to make your phone a lot smarter with the addition of Visual Intelligence and the ability to pass Siri requests 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 do that for you ChatGPT” machine, with all that entails: good, bad and everything in between.

By default, Siri will ask for confirmation every time it wants to pass a request to ChatGPT. This makes a lot of sense, and I thought I would prefer that behavior. But after using it for an afternoon, I realized I just wanted to get to the ChatGPT response faster and turned it off. Siri still handles basic questions on its own and doesn’t relay things like “When are the US elections?” luckily to ChatGPT. And it will still just Google something for you if that’s the best way to get to your answer.

But more complex things go to ChatGPT, which means Siri can handle a lot more things than I’m used to. Ask: “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 basically just shows you a Google search snippet.

AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini regularly make mistakes 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 really have no idea. I actually downloaded Gemini (via Google’s iOS app) to the iPhone 16 I’ve been using because I was tired of opening it in a browser. As long as you don’t blindly trust what the AI ​​tells you, it’s a useful way to be pointed in the right direction.

Apple has some nice privacy protections in place around your use of ChatGPT. OpenAI is “necessary only to process your request for the purpose of fulfilling it and does not store your request or the responses it provides,” Apple said. The information will also not be used to train AI models. When you log into your OpenAI account, your requests will be saved in your ChatGPT history and all OpenAI terms and conditions will apply. But you don’t need an OpenAI account at all if you don’t want or have one. I appreciate that.

iPhone 16 owners will also be able to use ChatGPT’s smart features in another way: Visual Intelligence, which is also available in 18.2. You can access it by pressing and holding the camera control button, which displays a live view of the camera. Once you take a photo, you can let ChatGPT analyze it or use Google Images to find similar results across the web. It’s a glorified iOS-enabled Google Lens, and it’s about time iPhones had something like that built-in. Siri could previously look up plants and landmarks and the like, but nothing as comprehensive as this.

Visual intelligence is pretty good – most of the time. It was terribly flattering in its descriptions of various places in my home, calling my hallway “cosy” and “well organised” and our whiskey collection “impressive.” It provided a decent list of cocktails I could make from a photo of my home bar, and it helped me move in the right direction on a home repair with a photo of the problem. As long as you take the answer as a starting point, AI is quite useful for these types of low-stakes questions.

But all the common pitfalls of AI chatbots are present, which Apple warns you about with every interaction you have with ChatGPT. I asked him to explain the joke in one Garfield comic to me, and it completely made up details that weren’t there (although to be fair, the joke it created was funnier than the actual source material). I asked it about the books on my shelf and it hallucinated some titles that are definitely not on that shelf.

I also wish ChatGPT would let you check its work like Gemini does. Google’s AI chatbot provides clear links to articles on the topics referenced, so you know where to read more and check what the AI ​​is telling you. ChatGPT lists in small print the number of sources it pulled from to come up with your answer for Siri, and you have to tap to see links to those articles.

Still, it’s a leap forward in the kinds of things you can expect from Siri. And it’s one that people won’t see if they download Apple Intelligence; In iOS 18.1, Siri gets a new look with a glowing border, a new text interface, and improved language understanding. But it’s basically the same old Siri.

That’s starting to change in 18.2, and Apple’s AI ambitions are even bigger than “go ask ChatGPT.” Ultimately, Siri can take action for you in apps – kind of the whole promise of AI on our phones. But those kinds of updates likely won’t arrive until well into 2025.

Of all the Apple Intelligence features I’ve used so far, the ChatGPT integration feels like the one I’ll use the most; in the same way that Gemini makes me use Google’s Assistant for more things more often. It’s not always correct, but as a tool to help me find the right answer, it’s pretty clever.