Should Apple let us choose our own AI chatbot to replace Siri?

The embarrassment over the state of Siri continues, with the discovery that the ‘intelligent’ assistant doesn’t even know what month it is.

My colleague Zac Hall suggested that things are now so bad the Siri brand is irredeemably tarnished, and any new version should be given a completely new name – but some think Apple should go further than this, and let us replace Siri with our own choice of AI chatbot …

Siri has been an embarrassment for a decade

Siri’s lack of progress has been the source of complaints for a decade now.

I could go on (and on and on), but you get the idea.

But things have recently gone critical

Those criticisms greatly increased when ChatGPT and other generative AI models demonstrated the huge gap between their own capabilities and those of Apple’s elderly voice assistant.

I’ve been doing my best to be fair to the company, acknowledging that Apple’s high privacy standards do pose a much bigger challenge for Siri, but reports that the relaunch has again been pushed back, this time to 2027, really do make it tough to give the company a continued pass.

Just how critical things have now become couldn’t be better illustrated when long-time Apple commenter – and one of the company’s closer friends – John Gruber went full-on thermonuclear on Siri.

Referring to Apple advertising Siri features which don’t yet exist, he argues that the company is “in disarray if not crisis,” is making “bullshit” claims, and has “squandered” its reputation with “a fiasco.”

I’ve argued that Apple could at least mitigate the reputational damage by a more open and honest approach, but some think it’s too late for this, and that a new approach is needed.

Apple could let us replace Siri

As John Gruber noted, developer Gus Mueller has suggested that Apple should let us choose our own intelligent assistant.

I was grousing to some friends that Apple needs to open up things on the Mac so other LLMs can step in where Siri is failing. In theory we (developers) could do this today, but I would love to see a blessed system where Apple provided APIs to other LLM providers.

ChatGPT, Gemini, Meta … heck, even DeepSeek if you’re crazy enough.

He notes in updates to the piece that he’s not the only one to be suggesting this.

Apple will of course raise its usual objection: that opening up the system to third-party apps creates privacy and security risks. But it’s already lost this argument – thanks to the EU, we can already set third-party apps as default system apps in many categories, including:

• Web browser
• Mail app
• Phone
• Messaging
• Password manager
• Translation

Apple already ensures each app has to request each of the system permissions it would like, and adding an intelligent assistant as a new category would be no different.

Indeed, Mueller argues in a follow-up piece that this could even improve privacy and security by allowing us granular control over the permissions we grant to a Siri alternative rather than simply accepting Apple’s choices.

As a user, I’d love to be able to say “sure, capture what’s on the screen and scrape the text out of that, but nope – you better not track where I’ve been over time”.

This would benefit both users and Apple itself

This would be great for users, as we’d no longer be forced to wait around until Apple finally launches its new Siri (or insert replacement brand name here). If we want a more intelligent assistant today, we could choose from all the LLM models out there.

But it would also benefit Apple. First, it would relieve it of the time pressure it’s currently under. Since users would be free to choose an alternative for now, it can really take its time with Siri, and launch the service it really wants, once the company is completely happy with its performance.

Second, Apple could boost its own Siri development efforts by gathering a vast amount of data about the chatbot requests iPhone users make of their third-party services. This would be massively valuable in steering the company’s own decisions.

Of course, Apple should ask user permission for this, but I’d certainly be happy to grant that, and I suspect most other iPhone users would too. Helping Apple develop the best possible Siri is in all our interests, even if it’s only to add to incentivize our preferred chatbot to keep innovating.

Should we be able to choose a Siri alternative?

Assume we have a free choice of the main LLMs, for example:

• ChatGPT
• Llama
• Claude
• Gemini
• DeepSeek (not that I’d recommend that!)

Assume also that we grant granular permissions for access to different categories of data: contacts, calendar, location, on-screen text, and so on.

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Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash