Apple cheating on Siri with Ernie Bot to satisfy its AI needs in China

Apple cheating on Siri with Ernie Bot to satisfy its AI needs in China،

When Apple CEO Tim Cook visited China to open a new flagship store in Shanghai, he also used the opportunity to make deals to better adapt the iPhone to the Chinese market.

Tim Cook praised local manufacturers who make the iPhone and its green manufacturing possible. He also promised that Apple would launch the Vision Pro mixed reality headset for the Chinese market as early as this year.

Apple's very large iPhone market share in China is on a downward trend, eaten away by local competition and geopolitical considerations. Tim Cook now aims to better tailor the iPhone experience to local customers.

In another example, Apple has apparently decided to now use the localized chatbot from Chinese search giant Baidu on its iPhones. Called Ernie Bot, the name of Baidu's chatbot stands for Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration.

Baidu has been developing its AI-based chatbot service since 2019 and last October announced Ernie 4.0, the large language model on which the iPhone's Earnie Bot will be based in China.

However, even before this announcement, searches for Apple's Siri virtual assistant defaulted to Baidu in China, rather than Google like the rest of the world. Apple's iPhone sales in China, however, are down nearly 25% year to date, and that's an unprecedented drop, so Apple is apparently trying to appease the local market by all possible means.

Samsung suffered a similar fate in China not long ago when it adopted Baidu's big-language Earnie model for AI tasks on its Galaxy S24 series, instead of using Gemini AI of Google as in the rest of its markets. Even the famous “Circle to Search” feature that made an appearance with the Galaxy S24 The series is powered by Baidu's AI cloud.

It remains to be seen whether these local AI adaptations will result in a stabilization of Apple or Samsung's market share in China, as well as how Baidu's Earnie Bot will perform compared to its main competitor, ChatGPT.