Apple plans Siri relaunch with auto-delete chat controls
Bloomberg says standalone Siri app will lean on Google Gemini, privacy pitch grows louder as outside compute enters the loop
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Apple is preparing to reintroduce Siri at WWDC in June with privacy as the headline feature, according to TechCrunch citing Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. The revamp is described as a reset for a voice assistant that has fallen behind newer chatbots, with a new Siri app expected to offer a conversational interface closer to ChatGPT.
Gurman’s reporting, as relayed by TechCrunch, says the redesigned Siri will include tighter limits on how long user information can be used and stored. One proposed tool is an auto-delete setting for conversations, with options to erase chats after 30 days, after one year, or to keep them indefinitely—mirroring retention controls Apple already offers in Messages. The pitch is familiar: while rivals compete on model size and feature breadth, Apple sells the idea that the device owner should decide what gets retained.
The detail that complicates the marketing is the reported reliance on Google’s Gemini technology to power the standalone Siri app. If parts of the assistant’s intelligence are provided by an outside model provider, privacy becomes less a blanket claim than a system design question: which requests are handled on-device, which are sent to servers, and who can log what. Gurman suggests Apple may lean heavily on privacy framing to explain why Siri still lags competitors in capability, while the role of Google in “handling some security aspects” could be easy to lose in the product narrative.
Apple has long treated privacy as a differentiator, but chat-style assistants change the data profile. A voice assistant used for timers and weather becomes a running diary when it is used for drafting, planning, troubleshooting, and personal questions; retention defaults then matter as much as encryption slogans. An auto-delete feature does not prevent collection in the first place, but it does reduce how long transcripts and context can sit around to be reused, breached, subpoenaed, or quietly repurposed.
WWDC will supply the concrete implementation details: what the default retention setting is, whether deletion is local or server-side, and whether users can verify what is actually stored. For now, the most specific promise in the reporting is also the smallest one: a menu that lets users decide how long their Siri conversations should survive.