Apple Pushes Siri to Quickly Evolve Into an AI Agent, With Internal Acknowledgment That It Has Not Yet Caught Up

Mark Gurman of Bloomberg reported that Apple CEO John Ternus is pressuring AI lead Craig Federighi to speed up the Siri roadmap, to deliver an AI agent that can compete with OpenAI's Dots and Meta's Muse, as relayed by The Verge.

The "agent" here refers to an AI assistant that can call tools and execute multi-step tasks. It differs from regular question-and-answer focused voice assistants, and the key distinction is whether it can complete full end-to-end operations in practice.

Federighi delivered a usable version of the Siri AI in a very short window of time. The report also notes that Apple has no false illusions internally: this version still does not measure up to competitors.

In the coming months, Siri is set to receive two obvious improvements. Public coverage has only expanded on one of them: Siri will gain fine-grained control over Apple's own first-party apps. For example, it will be able to rotate and crop images in Photos, and sort out Safari tabs. For developers, this type of capability is far more critical than chat functionality alone, as it means the assistant can invoke system capabilities to complete specific cross-app operations. The other improvement is not detailed in the available fragments of the original report.

What makes this newsworthy is that Apple's expectations for Siri have gone far beyond a standard voice assistant. It aims to turn Siri into an agent that can execute tasks and take over app operations. This direction is directly tied to its ongoing competition with OpenAI and Meta, which also explains why internal development timelines are being tightened.

For now, only the roadmap and one capability example are confirmed. How capable Siri will eventually become depends on whether subsequent versions can stabilize the first-party app control functionality, as well as how Apple handles permissions, unintended misoperations, and user trust. The full original The Verge article is available here: https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/1029552/apple-siri-ai-agentic