How Apple's AI project could bring a long-overdue Siri breakthrough

SiriGPT anyone?

- DAN MOREN

Artificial intelligence continues to be the latest buzzworthy buzzword floating around the tech industry. (Sorry, blockchain and non-fungible tokens, your 15 minutes are up.) And though Apple has plenty of ways it already leverages machine learning (fave.co/43dFPUj) to power up its technologies, it's hard to deny that there are some places where the company could still benefit from jumping on this latest bandwagon.

So it's interesting to hear a report in the New York Times (fave.co/42YhpxR) that Apple engineers are actively looking into language-generating Al, similar to the systems that underlie chatbots like ChatGPT, for a number of applications. And a follow-up report by 9to5Mac that confirmed the tech, code-named "Bobcat," is already being tested for tvOS 16.4 beta.

How could this technology be used in Apple's products? Well, as it happens, I can think of a few ways that it might be deployed, not all of which are simply about just creating a chatbot.

HELP, I NEED SOMEONE

Computers have by and large gotten easier over the past several decades, but it doesn't mean that they aren't still mystifying at times. Anyone who's ever tried to troubleshoot a loved one's haywire device and ended up wanting to break it into a million pieces can probably vouch for that fact.