Apple Has Relegated Its First AI Chatbot to Customer Support – Lifehacker
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Apple is unique among big tech companies in that it still doesn’t have a dedicated generative AI chatbot on its platforms.
The company’s first attempt at a chatbot is rolling out now in an early preview, as a customer support bot.
The chatbot appears competent at dealing with minor tech issues with Apple devices, at least at this stage.
You cannot talk to the chatbot about anything other than tech support.
When ChatGPT officially launched in late 2022, it kicked off a historic AI race we’re still living through today. The following year saw most of the biggest tech companies launching their own AI products: Google released Bard (now Gemini), Microsoft debuted Copilot, and Anthropic dropped Claude, even as OpenAI only continued to iterate on ChatGPT. One of the biggest players was infamously absent from this roster, however: Apple.
Despite being among the most valuable companies in the world, Apple has had a rough go of it when it comes to AI. Its big push into the space didn’t come in 2023 at all, but in 2024. Even then, Apple Intelligence has been a bit of a disaster. The company’s ostensible show-stopping feature, an overhauled, AI-powered Siri, was supposed to debut with iOS 18, but we’re still waiting—and it won’t arrive with iOS 26 this fall.
Apple does have generative AI features you can use today, including an image generator, a writing assistant, and an image editor. But what Apple Intelligence lacks is a dedicated chatbot: Siri will not engage in a conversation with you, and ChatGPT integration with iOS 18 is skewed more towards assisting you with tasks than holding a dialogue. If you want a chatbot experience on your iPhone, you need to use one of the dedicated third-party services available on the App Store or on the web.
That’s now changing, however—at least, as long as you only want to chat about technical issues. Apple recently updated its Apple Support app with a new “automated chat feature.” Indeed, if you tap on the “Chat” tab, you’ll be greeted by a “Chat with Support” splash screen that confirms the feature is experimental and in early preview.
MacRumors originally spotted the update, as well as a change to the company’s Terms of Use for the Support Assistant, which now reads: “Support Assistant uses generative models…You understand and agree that generative models may occasionally generate incorrect, misleading, incomplete, offensive, or harmful outputs.”
When you start a chat, you’ll see a similar warning at the top of the page: “You are chatting with Apple’s automated Support Assistant. This experimental feature may make mistakes. Verify important information.” From here, it’s like any chatbot experience you’ve probably had before—only much more limited in terms of topics. As advertised, the bot is really only concerned with helping you with your tech issues, and to that end, it actually seems to work well.
I struck up a conversation with it, pretending my iPhone was running hot, and it listed some scenarios in which that could happen, and asked whether I received a temperature warning or whether it was just warm to the touch. I went with the latter, which prompted the bot to ask if the phone was experiencing any other issues, like screen dimming or slowdowns. I reported my iPhone was running slow as well, and the bot suggested it could be an app running haywire, and offered specific instructions for force-quitting an app.
In another attempt, I acted like my MacBook Pro’s fans were running too fast. I was surprised to see the bot ask which of the two MacBook Pros attached to my Apple Account was having the issue (it noted the newer Pro was still covered under AppleCare+). I decided to say my older MacBook Pro was the one with the issue. After I told the bot the fans were not blocked, it offered detailed instructions on resetting the System Management Controller (SMC), a common piece of advice for resetting functions like fan speed on Intel Macs.
These are simple tests, but I’m honestly kind of impressed. Apple has a huge backlog of support articles to lean on, and it makes sense to be able to share these pieces of advice as customers ask relevant questions in real time, and the experience is pretty smooth. Throughout the exchange, the bot offers links out to different apps and services: If you’re asking about a broken iPad display, it’ll offer you an in-app setup experience to book a repair appointment. If you’re asking about a buying decision, it might offer a link to the Apple Store app.
I don’t have a real tech issue to test the bot’s usefulness, so I can’t really put it through its paces, but I’d definitely try it the next time I have a serious problem with one of my Apple devices.
If you try to talk to the bot about anything other than Apple tech support, you’ll be hit with the following: “I cannot help with that. I can answer questions or offer help with certain Apple products and services.” All of my attempts to chat with the bot about things you might ask ChatGPT failed. The bot doesn’t appreciate levity, either: When I told it my iPhone was running hot again, and it asked what I was doing just before I noticed it, I said “putting it in the microwave.” The bot told me to call 911 if this was an emergency, and gave me the option to talk to a human representative.
Apple seems to have implemented this bot with serious guardrails to prevent misuse, as I can’t get it to take the bait for anything outside the scope of tech support. Maybe someone out there with more experience in manipulating LLMs can engineer a prompt clever enough to bypass these restrictions, and I’d love to see how Apple’s bot would fare. But for now, the only way to experience Apple’s first generative AI chatbot is to ask it about your Apple devices. How fitting.
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