According to Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman, Apple’s chief executive John Ternus is urging senior engineer Craig Federighi to speed up the Siri roadmap so the assistant can rival OpenAI’s Dots and Meta’s Muse. Federighi has already shipped a functional AI-enhanced Siri on a compressed schedule, yet internal assessments suggest the company is falling behind its rivals in autonomous assistant capabilities.
Apple plans to roll out a set of refinements that give Siri precise command over its own suite of applications. The update, slated for iOS 27.3, will let the voice assistant manipulate photos,such as rotating or cropping images,and reorganize open web tabs in Safari without user intervention. These capabilities represent the first step toward more granular in-app automation.
A broader expansion will allow Siri to interact with services beyond Apple’s ecosystem. Gurman reports that integration with third-party platforms is expected in the spring, enabling the assistant to place food orders through Grubhub or secure restaurant reservations via OpenTable. This level of cross-app functionality would move Siri from a query tool to a transactional agent.
Competitors such as OpenAI’s Dots, Meta’s Muse and Anthropic’s Grok already demonstrate agents that can retain objectives, decide subsequent actions, and continue progress without explicit user prompts. Apple’s internal roadmap, as described by Gurman, aims to give Siri comparable autonomous reasoning, allowing it to pursue multi-step goals on behalf of the user.
Industry observers note that consumer expectations for proactive digital assistants are rising, leaving Apple little flexibility in its timeline. Gurman suggests that a more agentic Siri could appear as early as next year, driven by market pressure rather than pure innovation. The company’s success will hinge on how seamlessly it can blend third-party interactions with its privacy-centric brand.