Apple stated last year that it does not currently have any intentions to introduce a specialized chatbot to compete with ChatGPT, Gemini, or comparable services. The business might be preparing for an internal AI chatbot, though, as this announcement wasn't finalized.
According to Mark Gurman's claim in the most recent edition of the Power On newsletter, Apple is making progress on creating an AI chatbot. Gurman claims that earlier this year, the business established a group named "Answers, Knowledge, and Information" to develop a variety of internal AI services, such as a "new ChatGPT-like search experience."
Robby Walker, the former chief of Siri development at Apple, is now in charge of the company's new AI task force after being kicked off the Siri project.
Gurman adds that the group is working on creating an "answer engine" that can search the internet for answers to general knowledge queries. In addition to new back-end infrastructure intended to support search features in upcoming iterations of Siri, Spotlight, and Safari, a stand-alone app is presently being investigated. He went on.
Additionally, Apple has started recruiting fresh people with experience in search engine development and algorithms. Even though Apple's AI chatbot won't be officially released for years, it will be intriguing to see how it competes with ChatGPT.
ChatGPT has already been incorporated by Apple into the Siri voice assistant, giving iPhone users access to the same AI advantages as Android users. However, prior history has demonstrated that Apple generally has a bad relationship with outside service providers and, where possible, replaces them with internal alternatives.
How Apple intends to develop its answer engine is still up in the air. Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, announced a day after the company's record-breaking Q3 earnings report that the company will "substantially" increase its investment in AI and that it is now "quite open" to acquisitions in the AI space.
Coincidentally, there have been speculations that Apple is considering purchasing the AI-powered search engine Perplexity.