Apple is planning a total overhaul of Siri – with a focus on privacy, according to a new report.
For two years, Apple has been promising to bring entirely new capabilities to its virtual assistant, which will require a revamp of the system. Those new features will include the ability to understand a users’ personal context – so that they can ask when someone’s flight lands, and have the system know who that person is and find out more information about their travel, for instance.
But the overhaul and Apple’s artificial intelligence efforts more generally have run into a host of problems, and many of the features have come late or failed to arrive at all. That has included the changes to Siri.
Now, Apple is rumoured to be launching that new version of Siri at its annual software event, the Worldwide Developers Conference or WWDC, which will be held next month.
The new version of Siri will come with a range of features, but Apple hopes that its focus on privacy will be a key way of differentiating it from other competitors that already make more heavy use of AI, according to a new report from Bloomberg. That will include allowing users to automatically delete histories of their chats after 30 days or one year, the report claimed.
While other chatbots do offer the ability to delete chat histories and conduct temporary conversations, their privacy policies are more diffuse. What’s more, chat histories can be saved for years and even used to train those models further – potentially meaning that personal data is stored within the chatbot.
Those histories can however be helpful to users, since they can be used to personalise answers and provide more detailed context. Apple has in the past faced criticism that its strict belief in privacy has compromised some of its AI features, because they mean that its products have less data on users, though the company has repeatedly stressed that it believes it is possible to do both.
Other rumoured changes to Siri include a standalone app in which users can see their conversations, and a redesign of the ways that users are able to interact with the virtual assistant.
