Apple is now opening up Siri to all of the apps on your iPhone, as it attempts to revamp and transform its voice assistant.
The company has received sustained criticism over the quality of Siri, especially in recent years as competitors such as Google have adopted more and more AI features in their products. Critics have argued that Siri has been less powerful and less smart, in part because of a broad failure by Apple to adopt artificial intelligence tools rapidly enough.
Apple looked to address that in the summer, with the announcement of Siri AI, a total re-write of the voice assistant. The update, released in September with iOS 27, allows Siri to understand a users’ personal context through their own data and then use artificial intelligence to turn that into useful information and actions.
Initially, however, many of the useful parts of those tools were limited only to Apple’s own apps. Now, it is opening up those tools to all developers, allowing third-party apps to connect to the assistant.
It means that users would be able to ask Siri to change the destination of their taxi through the app they booked it in, just by asking, for instance. It will also allow for more complex tasks, with Apple pointing to the example of asking if a given pair of shoes are on sale in an app – or asking for a comparison with other similar ones that might be available.
The system is built around “app intents”, a new tool that Apple introduced in 2022 and allows apps to identify specific actions – such as ordering food – and show them to the operating system. But it should require no technical understanding on the part of the people using it, who will just be able to ask Siri about the status of their takeaway order and receive information on it.
The new feature is now available to developers, as part of the release of an early version of iOS 27.3. It will not be available to the public for a “few months”, the company said, with developers able to submit their apps using the feature “in the Spring”.
The feature will rely on Apple Intelligence, and therefore require a device that supports those AI features and can only be used in languages that support it. It will also not be available in Europe, given Apple’s ongoing troubles with regulation from the EU, which the company says it is “working constructively” with to “attempt to find a path forward”.
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