Apple Looks for Answers as Google Trolls its AI Efforts

Apple looks to be changing a key part of its AI strategy again with a new team being built to put together AI-powered search that can underpin Siri, Spotlight, and more.

It is well known by now that Apple's AI strategy has not been the smooth sailing experience we are rightly or wrongly accustomed to from Cupertino. But when rival companies start satirising its travails in their own attack ads, you've got to think it makes for uncomfortable viewing around the Infinite Loop meeting rooms.

"If you buy a new phone because of a feature that's coming soon, but it's been coming soon for a full year, you could change your definition of  'soon'. or you could just change your phone," says Google in an ad for its forthcoming Pixel 10.

Harsh but fair. While it's debatable exactly how many people bought an iPhone 16 on the basis of new Apple Intelligence features last year, Apple was certainly making enough of a song and dance about them that you knew it thought they ought to. Most of them are still yet to appear and Apple has admitted that whatever it needs to do to make Siri more usable is going to take a lot longer than it thought.

Current ETA is 2026. "We're making good progress on a more personalized Siri, and as we've said before, we expect to release these features next year," said CEO Tim Cook on the company's last earnings call. That will be two years after they were announced. 

A New Approach 

No wonder that the company is looking for answers; specifically those that the  Answers, Knowledge and Information team can provide according to the latest edition of Mark Gurman's Power On newsletter. This marks a new direction for the company. Previously it had said it wasn't going to create its own AI chatbot, but the popularity of using such devices for search is becoming increasingly hard to ignore.

Siri currently hands off such things to ChatGPT via an interface and experience best described as clunky. And that's on a good day. Go hands free and you're as likely to hear it chirpily say it has found some results on the web for you via Google.

Now, Apple has never developed its own search. Google has always been unreachably in front of the opposition and, perhaps more to the point, pays Apple a very useful $20bn a year to be the default search option on all its devices. That cosy deal is under threat from US legal action, however, so the twin drivers of that and the rise of AI search are leading Apple to create its own chatbot-like search experience.

"While still in early stages, the team is building what it calls an “answer engine” — a system capable of crawling the web to respond to general-knowledge questions," writes Gurman. "A standalone app is currently under exploration, alongside new back-end infrastructure meant to power search capabilities in future versions of Siri, Spotlight and Safari."

A recruitment spree is currently underway as the company looks to build the team. You just have to hope that when the fruits of its labours are announced, they're done so in at least some proximity to when the features might actually become available.

Who knows, we might even get something in our hands close to the infamous and quickly pulled Bella Ramsay ad from March this year.