Apple’s head of software engineering, Craig Federighi, says that the revamped Siri should not be seen as a separate chatbot for your iPhone but instead an integral part of Apple’s operating systems and Apple Intelligence.
My initial play with the new Siri shows that it is indeed deeply integrated and can work alongside the apps you use every day, but there were inevitably some limitations with the early beta version that I tried.
Federighi made the ‘not a chatbot’ declaration during a tech talk at Apple’s WWDC26 developer conference in Cupertino, California. At the event he was joined by Siri boss Mike Rockwell and AI lead Amar Subramanya.
“We see Siri, not as a separate chatbot, an unintegrated place you go and chit chat, but rather as an integral, conversational tool that you use in the moment, deeply integrated into your experience,” said Federighi.
“Understanding what’s on screen, able to interface, not in some separate world, but directly in the document that you’re editing… And so, while these experiences are conversational, they are really an extension of your system experience, deeply integrated into your flow.
Talking about the standalone Siri app, Federighi said that it exists essentially to help you get back to conversations you had previously.
“If you want to get back to such a chat that you had, because you want to continue it, you want to reference it – and quite honestly, on our platform, the most natural affordance for a user to go and find something like that – is to have an app they can manage on their home screen, launch, get back to… And so we have a Siri app, and that Siri app just embodies those capabilities of that core system experience.
In response to an audience question, Rockwell also hinted at future extensions to the Siri AI platform to be more of an autonomous agent, going and doing tasks on your behalf. “[An agent is] something that is operating on a loop of information coming in, making decisions, and then taking action. And ours [Siri] is primarily request based today. But the underpinning architecture for Siri is a completely modern architecture, and so our ability to extend in the future is is very similar [to others].”
During the session, Federighi also addressed the relationship with Google’s Gemini, saying that “we use none of the models that Google deploys to their customers, nor do we use the infrastructure and means by which they deploy models to their customers. And then, when it comes to the knowledge base we, of course, don’t use Google Search or anything like that as the foundation of our system. So I hope that’s clear. The amount of the Google Assistant we use is none.”
