Firefox’s new voice feature answers quick questions on iPhone

Mozilla just added a new trick to Firefox on the iPhone. It’s dubbed Quick Answers, and it lets you ask a question out loud, and Firefox gives you a short answer without making you open a bunch of tabs or run a full search.

Here’s how it works. You open a new tab, long-press the voice button, and just say what’s on your mind. Something like “what does mellifluous mean” or “what is 95 degrees Fahrenheit in Celsius.” Firefox reads back a quick answer, and if you want more, it drops in links to the sources so you can keep digging.

Mozilla is pitching this as the thing you reach for when you don’t want to fall down a rabbit hole. As the company puts it, sometimes “you just need a little context so you can get back to what you were doing.” That’s a fair way to describe how most of us search on our phones anyway.

And of course, with Mozilla’s name behind the feature, they’ve made sure to keep things private. Everything you say gets processed right on your device using Apple’s speech recognition, so your actual audio never leaves the phone. 

Mozilla says “no raw audio is stored or sent to the server,” and Firefox doesn’t hand over your browsing history or personal details to the AI either. Only the typed-out version of your question gets sent off to generate the answer. If you’d rather not use it at all, there’s an off switch under Settings and then AI Controls.

Meanwhile, the company is also working on a built-in VPN for Android and iOS, so the mobile privacy push seems to be a real theme right now.

That said, when we covered the Firefox 153 iOS update yesterday, the App Store notes didn’t say a word about Quick Answers, so this looks like a separate rollout. And it’s a limited one. The feature is only going out to Firefox for iOS users in the US who browse in English for now. I tried getting it running here in India, even with a VPN switched on, and it just wouldn’t turn up on my end.

We’re digging into everything else in this release separately, so keep an eye out for our full Firefox 153 coverage as it goes live.

Update: Our detailed coverage on the Firefox 153 desktop release is live. You can check it out here.

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