Apple's Greg JOZ Joswiak talks the new Siri AI, Parental Controls, their fight with the EU and more

Yeah, I mean, look, AI, you know, Trevor, we've been working on it for years. Years and years and years. I mean, we were the first ones to put a neural engine, you know, in our iPhones back in 2017. So, it's been a big part of what we've been doing for years. We did announce the original Apple Intelligence in 2024. And by the way, we shipped almost all of that. But we didn't ship a couple Siri features. And part of what you're referencing is we had a conversation that said, look, we knew last March that we weren't going to deliver it. And the reason that we weren't is by our choice. We said, look, what we were doing with this original version of what we were working on just wasn't hitting our quality bar. You know, Apple people expect quality solutions from Apple. And we made a decision there to say that instead of just trying to ship it for shipping's sake, that we were going to build it into the next architecture of Siri, what we're now calling Siri AI. And that we thought that would be a much better solution for customers. I'd make that decision again and again and again. And you saw people are pretty excited about Siri AI, and that's because it is really, really cool.

Yeah, we wanted to show those were real demos. And by the way, we actually filmed these, as you know, a bit in advance. So, that was Siri AI for instance, where it was at that point. You ask those same questions to it now, it's faster, right? And it'll be faster still, you know, by the time you get to launch. But, we wanted to show this off as real. And that was important to us to do that side-by-side so that you realize that was the real demo.

Yeah, no, there was a lot of confusion, right? Because Google has a lot of things named Gemini. And what some people were thinking is that Siri AI must be, you know, a re-wrapping of a Gemini app or Gemini assistant. And it's not the case. Actually, we collaborate with Google. They've been fantastic partners, by the way. We collaborate with them because they developed these incredible frontier models. And we engaged with them to create a whole new set of models, right? Called Apple Foundation models. And that we would be delivering those, you know, on device, in the cloud. We use some of the outputs from the frontier model to do it, but these are entirely new models created specifically as Apple Foundation models. Siri is powered by them. So, this isn't Gemini the way that somebody would use a Gemini app or a Gemini service that they're used to. It's using Gemini in collaboration with the Gemini technology, which is a big umbrella for Google.

For me, I always say this is like the Siri you wanted. You know, Siri is super popular. People I don't even know realize it's used over 2 billion times a day. It's super popular. But this makes it even more powerful, more capable, more conversational. It understands your personal context and by that it means, you know, I just actually did an example, you know, I was actually using it for work. I was like, 'Hey, where's that information that Bob gave me?' And I gave it the matter because I couldn't remember did he text it to me? Email to me? Siri searched its world and it brought up that information because it understands everything that's on my device. Not Apple, not our servers, right? Your device does. And this is why we've done this incredible capability keeping it privacy preserving. It also can tap into world knowledge so I can ask it questions like maybe like you would ask a chatbot, but it's again it's so much more than that because it's integrated into your system. And one of the things we're excited about is we're here at the developer conference, you know, to introduce it to developers because they can make their apps work with it as well. So it is, yeah, and I think the best way to look at it is the Siri I always wanted.

Yeah, that's critically important to us is to keep your information private. So the way we do that is we keep your information on your device or in the times it has to go up to the cloud, we have something called private cloud compute which has the same privacy promise that you have on your device which means that we just use the information just for the moments necessary to do the execution and then it's not stored, it's thrown away. And like I said, Siri now is just so capable, you know, it's even more conversational. You can speak to it. You can like how many times you're like, 'Oh, hold on.' You know, you stop yourself and I got to start over. It's like, 'No, you can back up.' It understands what you're saying just like you and I can understand each other even if we're not perfect in our context, kind of like I'm doing in the interview probably. You know, so it's quite capable that way and it sounds better when it talks to you. We have on our more capable devices we have even a better way for Siri to sound to you and it's incredible dictation, too. So, now you don't have to do the punctuation, I can just speak to it, it gets all the punctuation right, the capitalization, the whole works. It's really cool.

Yeah, it's heartbreaking to us. You know, we've been in Europe for 40 years. Our European customers are so important to us. We love them. We're able to ship it by the way on Mac and Vision Pro, but we're not able to ship Siri AI to iPhone and iPad users at the launch and the reasons being is we tried to provide solutions to the European Commission that try to achieve what we think they're trying to achieve as far as interoperability goes, but to preserve our customers' privacy and security and they basically want us to unleash all that information we just talked about, this personal context, to any developer or to any virtual assistant.

But it's even more than that. They want that broad access to that information without any guardrails, safeguards and by the way, we don't have that information. Right? I just mentioned your device does. Right? And that's what I'm saying which is very different. We don't want that information. We don't want it to be something that could be hacked from us or somebody could make us give it to them. That is something that sits only on your device. And as I said, when it actually transacts through the cloud, it's used for that instant and then gone away. And so, they're actually asking us to give this information to developers that we ourselves don't have.

Well, we certainly hope that other governments don't follow the failed European experiment. You know, with the DMA, which has just been, it hasn't been great for users as well.

It's frustrating. Like I said, it's frustrating, it's heartbreaking, you know. We wish we could deliver this to our users there. You know, and we're going to work hard to do it. We propose specific solutions to them. They have not accepted those. We're going to continue to try to engage with them. We're going to continue to try to do the right thing for our users there, but we won't compromise their privacy and security.

And it can be done correctly. You know, Japan has similar regulation but done in a much more thoughtful way for users. And so, they're getting what they're setting out to achieve. Yet, they're doing it not at the expense of their citizens.

Yeah. No, there's a lot of governments who've been concerned about this sort of thing and a lot of parents who've been concerned about this sort of thing. You're right that we've had some solutions in place and glad to hear you're using them, but quite honestly, we looked at any of the pain points around that. And we wanted to make the solution even better. One of the things we want to do is make it much easier to use. Much easier for any parent to set up and be able to manage who their kids can contact, what content can they see, what apps can they download, when can they use their device, how long can they use their device, and to make it very simple. And to not just, you know, one of the things that we realized in this process in doing our work is that all the experts would tell us, remind us that every child is different. Right? And that we need to be respectful of that. And so, we worked with the experts to say, 'Okay, what is the range, you know, that you would recommend for kids?' And we made a very easy interface so that, for example, on the time, you know, you can understand the range that experts say. You can actually go outside of that range if you want, but you can do the range and you can help manage things like the entertainment or social media or games and how much time your kids are spending on these things. It's, I think it's quite powerful. It received, got seemed to receive very well. I was glad to hear your Prime Minister seemed to really like it.

Yeah, exactly. I was trying to manage privacy, as you know, and protect privacy. So, we've had nudity protection, but as you noted, we now added this year the ability to also sense when there's violence or gore coming across and to then block that so that it becomes not an issue.

You have done your research, my friend.

Gosh, you remember me in pink pants and flip-flops on your 40th. You have a great memory. Yeah, today is my 40th anniversary at Apple, can you believe it? I'm blown away and you have a good memory. My first day at Apple, I remind people that I had a mullet. You know, I called them salmon pants. Some people might have called them pink, but I wore salmon pants and flip-flops and I wore them to work and my girlfriend at the time, who's now my wife, said, 'You're not going to work that way.' And I said, 'It's California. Everybody goes to work that way.' You know what? In '86, a lot of people went to work that way. Yeah, people came to work without shoes back then. So.

I appreciate that. Means a lot. Thank you.

Thank you, Trevor. Appreciate that. Thank you.