Apple Support Advisors May Soon Employ AI to Help Answer Your Questions

Although Apple has long baked machine learning and AI into many of the iPhone’s features, 2024 may be the year we see the company move into user-facing generative AI. However, it looks like the company isn’t just planning to use AI to make Siri more conversationally useful — it’s also testing internal tools to help its support staff respond to customers more efficiently.

Information obtained by the folks at MacRumors reveals that AppleCare support advisors are testing a new “ChatGPT-like generative AI tool” called “Ask” to help them resolve customer support issues by having the information they need at their fingertips.

Don’t worry, though; Apple isn’t planning on having you talk to a chatbot when calling into support — at least not anytime soon. Instead, “Ask” is intended for use by the support advisors. The person you’re talking to may feed questions into “Ask” to get faster answers to complex problems, which they can then relay back to the customer over the phone or in an online chat.

Presumably, Apple’s support reps won’t just be reading the AI tool’s responses verbatim. Instead, these are intended to give them the background information that they can then put into the context of the customer’s specific situation.

MacRumors says that the tool is being tested by a subset of AppleCare support advisors, who are being asked to use it before falling back to traditional search methods or consulting a senior advisor for help. “Ask” is tied into Apple’s internal knowledge base, which means anything coming out of it should be “factual, traceable, and useful.” Advisors can ask up to five follow-up questions for a given topic to help narrow things down.

Since most frontline support reps don’t have all the answers themselves, it’s common for them to need to go in search of specific answers when presented with thorny problems by customers. However, zeroing in on a solution can sometimes be tricky with traditional search methods, and Apple is hoping that “Ask” will ferret out the relevant details more quickly, resulting in faster resolutions for customer problems.

Earlier this month, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported on several new AI initiatives within Apple, including its work on the Siri improvements we’ll likely see in iOS 18 and the first hint of Apple’s plans to leverage it for AppleCare support.

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The company has also continued to hone its own LLMs to enhance Siri and services like AppleCare support. The company is looking to improve Siri’s ability to answer complex questions accurately, and the customer service teams are trying to speed up chat and phone support. Apple is also heavily invested in integrating AI into its health features.

Mark Gurman

This new “Ask” tool is most likely what Gurman is talking about. However, it sounds like Apple may use the same large language models (LLMs) to enhance Siri. We’ll probably get Apple’s first official word on this in June when it unveils iOS 18 at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). Who knows? Someday you may even be able to ask Siri for help with your iPhone or Mac before calling AppleCare.