Apple is racing to make Siri more agentic
Bloomberg reports Apple is pressuring its AI team to accelerate Siri's roadmap, aiming to compete with OpenAI's Dots and Meta's Muse with upcoming third-party app integration.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
- Apple is accelerating development to make Siri a powerful AI agent.
- iOS 27.3 will bring fine-grained control over Apple first-party apps.
- Third-party app integration for services like Grubhub is planned for Spring.
- The ultimate goal is multi-step autonomous task execution by next year.
Apple is facing mounting pressure to upgrade its digital assistant, with executive John Ternus reportedly pushing AI chief Craig Federighi to fast-track Siri's development roadmap. The goal is to build a capable AI agent that can effectively compete with industry rivals like OpenAI's Dots and Meta's Muse, which have set a high bar in the generative AI space.
While Federighi's team previously delivered a functional version of Siri AI within an exceptionally tight timeframe, company leadership acknowledges they are still playing catch-up against fierce market competition. This urgency has triggered a plan to roll out major improvements much sooner than initially expected.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
Two significant upgrades are scheduled to roll out in the coming months. The first wave will introduce fine-grained control over Apple's native applications, enabling users to perform actions such as rotating and cropping images inside the Photos app or organizing tabs in Safari. These capabilities are anticipated to arrive alongside the iOS 27.3 update.
A larger shift involving third-party app integration is slated to debut later in the Spring. This milestone will allow Siri to handle practical real-world requests, such as placing food delivery orders through Grubhub or securing restaurant reservations via OpenTable.
The push to transform Siri into an agentic AI highlights a broader industry shift from simple, single-turn voice commands to autonomous systems capable of maintaining long-term context and executing multi-step workflows without constant human prompts.
Beyond these immediate updates, Apple's long-term vision is to evolve Siri into a true assistant that handles ongoing tasks rather than isolated, one-off interactions.
"Dots, Muse and Grok can keep track of goals, determine what needs to happen next and continue pursuing objectives without the user initiating every individual step. Apple ultimately wants to go in this direction, I’m told, and I believe the company could make Siri more like an agent as early as next year."
Mark Gurman
Driven by shifting consumer expectations and intense market demands, these advanced autonomous features could begin materializing in Apple devices as early as next year.
Source: The Verge
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