On October 31, Alibaba and Apple reached a partnership to integrate Qwen into Apple Intelligence. Chinese users can directly access Qwen's text and image understanding, content generation, and other capabilities in Siri, Writing Tools, and Visual Intelligence. These features will open for testing starting November 4 with the latest iOS developer Beta, and will be rolled out to Chinese users with the official release of iOS 27.3 in December.
Siri can directly draw on Qwen's broad knowledge and answer users' questions directly in Siri. Through Siri, users can also ask Qwen questions directly using documents and photos of their own choosing. Before any question, document, or image is sent to Qwen, the user's consent is obtained first.
Qwen has also been integrated into Apple's system-level Writing Tools, providing users with the "Compose with Qwen" feature. "Compose with Qwen" helps users generate content on any topic. Users can also use this feature to generate images.
On iPhone, users can gain deeper insight into their surroundings through the Visual Intelligence feature, including selecting "Ask Qwen" to identify what is in front of them. Users can enable Visual Intelligence via Camera Control, the Action Button, or Control Center.
Users can freely choose whether to enable the Qwen integration. Once enabled, users can sign in with Apple or with their own Qwen App account to use Qwen in Siri, Writing Tools, and Visual Intelligence. Users can independently decide when to use Qwen and what information to share. Neither users' requests nor the generated replies will be used by Alibaba for model training, in order to protect user privacy.
Currently, the Qwen integration will be available in iOS to users in China who purchased an iPhone that supports Apple Intelligence, or whose device location and Apple Account country/region are both set to China.
Eddie Wu, CEO of Alibaba Group, said: "We are delighted to reach a partnership with Apple. Leveraging Alibaba's deep AI technology expertise, Qwen will be deeply integrated into the various experiences of the Apple ecosystem, jointly bringing brand-new intelligent services to Apple users in China."