Apple In Negotiations With Google To Tap Gemini AI To Boost Siri’s Smarts

Apple’s current AI efforts have not gone well for the company. Apple Intelligence has failed to deliver on several fronts, including the promised upgrades to its Siri assistant, and other moves have mostly fallen flat. These AI shortcomings have forced the company to begin looking at outside partners to bolster the AI features it can add to Siri. Google is one such partner under consideration, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.

Gurman is reporting that Apple has approached Google to build a custom AI model. This potential project is reportedly far enough along that Google has already started to train a model built to run on Apple’s server infrastructure. If this partnership comes to fruition, this model will be the basis for an updated Siri that could roll out to users sometime next year.


However, Apple hasn’t given up on developing in its own AI solution. There are two versions of Siri supposedly being tested, a version called Linwood running on internally developed models, and another version named Glenwood that’s powered by AI developed externally. The company will determine what path it wants to take once testing has concluded.

A partnership with Google seems like a sensible move to upgrade Siri. The two companies already have a very fruitful partnership in which Google provides Apple with search capabilities within the Safari web browser in iOS. However, this prior partnership has already drawn attention from the Department of Justice for antitrust issues. Teaming up again on AI may bring unwanted attention from the government.

An ideal situation would be to allow users to roll with their own preferred AI provider. Make the integration feel like a natural part of the operating system, while still protecting the privacy of users, would be a sensible way to achieve this. This would also allow Apple to focus on its hardware and software, which is the  company's core competency anyway.