Apple’s walled gardens may be forced open once again, as the company plans to meet European Union legislation by allowing users to replace Siri with third-party voice assistants, according to a Bloomberg report. The proposed change would allow users to swap out Siri as the default voice assistant for any other third-party assistant on their iPhones.
In theory, this should mean that Google Assistant/Gemini or ChatGPT could be the voice on the iPhone. The advent of AI has also seen many other competing chatbots with voice modes rise, including DeepSeek and Meta AI.
Currently, Apple has a partnership with OpenAI that allows Siri to enlist the help of ChatGPT for queries it deems difficult to answer.
Apple ramps up work on AI-powered Siri
Apple had promised a revamped Siri upgrade with contextual awareness, the ability to understand more nuanced requests and AI-powered features at WWDC 2024.
Almost a year has passed since then, and the company has yet to roll out the new features, and it does not look likely that they will be coming to the iPhones anytime soon, given that WWDC 2025 is just around the corner.
Apple had also promised these features during the iPhone 16 launch in September last year, and a failure to deliver on those promises has also led to a class action lawsuit blaming the company for false advertising.
Meanwhile, the Bloomberg report notes that the Apple team is working hard at its AI offices in Zurich to create a new software architecture to replace the current hybrid Siri model with a version built entirely on a large language (LLM)-based engine.
The idea here is to use the power of LLMs to make Siri “more believably conversational and better at synthesizing information”.
The tech giant has also reportedly deployed thousands of analysts across its offices from Texas to Ireland, reviewing Apple Intelligence summaries to determine the number of times its system hallucinates (makes stuff up).
