Apple is preparing to rebuild Siri around a custom version of Google's Gemini artificial-intelligence model, in a partnership that pairs two of the industry's biggest names ahead of the company's Worldwide Developers Conference. Apple is reported to be paying Google roughly $1bn a year for a tailored 1.2-trillion-parameter model to power the revamped assistant.
The arrangement, which Google has publicly confirmed, marks a significant acknowledgement by Apple that it needed outside help to deliver the kind of conversational, capable assistant that rivals have pushed to the centre of their products. A long-promised overhaul of Siri has slipped repeatedly, and the Gemini deal offers a route to catching up quickly.
Apple has emphasised that the model would run within its own Private Cloud Compute infrastructure, which it says uses end-to-end encryption and hardware-isolated enclaves so that user data is not shared with Google and is not retained after processing. The Gemini model's weights would operate inside Apple's systems rather than on Google's servers, the company has indicated.
The redesigned Siri, expected as part of the next version of Apple's mobile software, is anticipated to function much more like a full chatbot, with abilities including web search, summarising content, generating images and carrying out multi-step commands. The changes would represent the most substantial reworking of the assistant since its debut.
The deal deepens an already lucrative relationship between the two companies, which extends to the long-running arrangement that makes Google the default search engine on Apple devices. It also illustrates how the economics of frontier AI have pushed even fierce competitors to strike supply agreements for the most advanced models.
Apple's developer conference, where the new assistant is expected to be previewed, opens on June 8. Investors and users alike will be watching to see whether the Gemini-powered Siri can finally match the capabilities that have reshaped expectations of what a voice assistant should do.