The official launch of Apple Intelligence is less than a week away, but it’s the next wave of AI updates that will start to make Siri much 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 forward Siri queries to ChatGPT. On phones that support Apple Intelligence, Siri won’t just be a “let me Google that” machine; now it’s a “let me ChatGPT for you” machine, with all that entails: the good, the bad and everything in between.

By default, Siri will ask for confirmation every time it wants to forward a request to ChatGPT. This makes a lot of sense and I thought I would prefer this behavior. But after an afternoon of use, 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 convey things like “When are the US elections?” » at ChatGPT, fortunately. And you’ll always just Google something when that’s the best way to get your answer.

But more complex things go to ChatGPT, which means Siri can handle a lot more stuff than I’m used to. Ask him “What cocktails can I make with whiskey and lemon juice?” » and you will get a short list of options with descriptions. Old Siri will simply show you a Google search snippet.

AI chatbots like Google’s ChatGPT and 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 have almost no idea. I actually downloaded Gemini (via Google’s iOS app) on the iPhone 16 I use 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 practical way to point you in the right direction.

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

iPhone 16 owners will also have another way to leverage ChatGPT’s intelligence: Visual Intelligence, which is also enabled in version 18.2. It is accessed by holding down the camera control button, which brings up a live view of the camera. Once you’ve taken a photo, you can ask ChatGPT to analyze it or use Google Image Search to find similar results across the web. It’s a glorified Google Lens optimized for iOS, and it’s about time iPhones included something like this. Siri could previously search for plants, landmarks, etc., but nothing as expensive as this.

Visual intelligence is pretty good, for the most part. It was very flattering in his descriptions of various places around my house, calling my entryway “cozy” and “well-organized” and our whiskey collection “impressive.” He gave me a decent list of cocktails to make based on a photo of my home bar, and it got me started in the right direction for a home repair with a photo of the problem. As long as you view the answer as a starting point, AI is very handy for these kinds of low-stakes questions.

But all the familiar pitfalls of AI chatbots are there, and Apple warns you with every interaction you have with ChatGPT. I asked him to explain the joke in a Garfield a comic for me, and she was completely making up details that didn’t exist (although, to be fair, the joke she made up was funnier than the actual source material). I asked him about the books on my shelf and he hallucinated some titles that are definitely not on that shelf.

I also wish ChatGPT would let you verify its work like Gemini does. Google’s AI chatbot provides obvious links to articles on the topics it references, so you know where to go to learn more and check what the AI ​​is telling you. ChatGPT mentions in fine print how many sources it pulled to find your answer for Siri, and you have to tap to see links to those articles.

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

That starts to change in version 18.2, and Apple’s AI ambitions are even bigger than “go ask ChatGPT.” Eventually, Siri will be able to act for you in applications – a bit like the promise of AI on our phones. But these types of updates probably won’t arrive until 2025.

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