Apple’s walled gardens could be forced to open once again as the company plans to meet European Union legislations by allowing users to replace Siri with 3rd 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 up 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 uprade with contexual awarness, ability to understand more nuanced requests and AI powered features at WWDC 2024. Almost a year since then, the company is yet to rollout the new features and it doesn’t look likely that they would 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 Apple team is working hard at its AI offices in Zurich to create a new software architecture for replacing the current hybrid Siri model with a version built entirely on large language model (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).