Cook confirms Apple Intelligence beta for China in late October, Qwen integration confirmed
APPSO · wechat · 2026-10-15
APPSO confirmed with Apple chairman Tim Cook that the first Apple Intelligence features will enter beta testing in mainland China by late October—finally giving Chinese users a concrete timeline after two years of waiting.
- The initial beta includes Writing Tools, image cleanup, and live translation; the new Siri is not part of this first wave. Bloomberg previously reported Apple plans a full rollout in December via iOS 27.3 across iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
- The model strategy is coming into focus: Alibaba's Qwen will be integrated directly into Apple Intelligence for text and image understanding and generation, while Apple and Alibaba are also jointly training a dedicated model for the Chinese market and local services.
- Timelines for the jointly trained model and the new Siri remain unannounced.
More from Apps
- One-shot prompt turns a puzzle photo into a step-by-step guide site (and a cool favicon) — fofrAI · 2026-10-15
- Odessia launches licensed AI travel concierge that books hotels at agency rates with perks — rohanpaul_ai · 2026-10-15
- Having agents operate everyday apps may be a false premise, argues viral Chinese thread — sujingshen · 2026-10-15
- Grok autonomously picks the shop and completes a real wine order in agentic shopping test — FlorianGallwitz · 2026-10-15
- Google launches Deep Review: 2 free AI paper reviews a week, powered by Gemini 4 Argon — JeremyNguyenPhD · 2026-10-15
- Kimi Releases Workflow Tutorial #3: Swarm, Plugins and Local Project Sync — Kimi_Moonshot · 2026-10-15