Your iPhone has a Siri AI kill switch. Here’s how to use it
Last month, Apple rolled out its long-awaited AI chatbot, dubbed Siri AI. The launch comes at a time when investors see AI as a must-have offering, while consumers are increasingly cautious about the effects that artificial intelligence will have on their lives and society at large. As AI backlash mounts, it is the latter group who may be the least interested in—or most distrustful of—the new…
Apple has recently introduced Siri AI, an AI chatbot on its latest iPhones, which has sparked mixed reactions among users. This AI chatbot, powered by Google's Gemini foundational models, is designed to be always-on and can understand data displayed on your iPhone screen and what you're doing with the device.
Apple provides a kill switch for Siri AI, allowing users to disable it if they're not interested in or distrustful of this new feature. Disabling Siri AI does not shut down Apple's entire Apple Intelligence platform, which continues to run in the background, enabling features like generative writing tools, AI photo editing, and image generation.
However, once Siri AI is disabled, users will lose the ability to engage in new conversations or continue existing ones with the chatbot, and certain functionalities like voice commands and visual intelligence may be limited.
To disable Siri AI, users can open the Settings app, tap Siri, then tap "Turn Off Siri." This action will disable Siri AI while keeping the Apple Intelligence-powered features active. If users later decide they want to use Siri AI again, they can simply return to the Siri settings and turn it back on. Disabling Siri AI may also help improve battery life, as the chatbot consumes some resources.
Despite some concerns about AI's capabilities, Apple's Siri AI is currently far less powerful than frontier AI models, and users can easily revoke access to specific apps if they wish.
Written by urgent.news from Fast Company's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
