When Apple initially rolled out Apple Intelligence, the company was pretty openly against the idea of creating a Siri chatbot. Now, things have changed a little – and the company is rumored to be deploying a Siri app in iOS 27, so users can chat with the next generation of Apple Foundation Models. While that’s a great starting point, I think theres a better idea to be tapped into here.
Messages is the answer
People already use an Apple-made app every single day for talking. Why not use it for AI?
It wouldn’t be that inconceivable to have a ‘Siri’ conversation in your Messages app. Only real issue would be wanting to split up conversation history, but it likely wouldn’t be too difficult to add a picker for conversational AI apps to separate conversation chains.
That’s just the start though. Why not bring in third parties?
Apple has, at least so far, fumbled its potential to be a dominant AI platform. Sure, you download AI apps on the App Store, but Apple doesn’t truly own a part of that experience as of yet.
It could with iMessage, though.
There’s already a number of conversational AI apps that likely rely on Mac mini server farms to provide an experience over iMessage. Most notably, Poke.
Apple also offers Business Chat already. If you’ve ever contacted a companies support line in the Messages app, you’ve probably experienced it. It’s not exactly developer friendly, though.
If Apple, with iOS 27, introduced a new API for developers to launch conversational AI apps on iMessage – it’d unlock loads of potential.
Instead of needing to open the Claude app to manage your Remote Control Claude Code session, what if you could just do it from Messages? Or, if you have a financial management app with an AI chatbot – what if it could just text you about your spending on iMessage, instead of you needing to think about opening the app?
I’m sure a number of developers wouldn’t want to give up their control. I can’t imagine a world where you don’t need a ChatGPT app anymore. That said, for tasks where Messages would create genuine convenience, I think it could be a big hit.
Top comment by ObviousLogic
“fumbled its potential to be a dominant AI platform”
Apple has no interest in being a dominant AI platform. This is clearly indicated by their disinterest in building out huge AI data centers as all the other developers have; Google, FaceBook, Microsoft, OpenAI have all invested $100’s of billions building their LLM infrastructures, while Apple has barely spent anything at all.
Apple is concentrating most of their research and investment towards on device AI processing which is much harder to achieve since the resources are extremely limited. This new Siri they’re working on, has to function the same across all of their supported devices, which I believe is any device with a neural engine and at least 8GB of RAM.
And yes, Apple did recently license Google’s Gemini model, and more than likely it be will be used to help train their own Foundation models. Which in the long run saves them a vast amount of money (and time).
Plus, it gives developers a larger user base, since the user will see it on their iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch, rather than wherever they installed the app – typically just iPhone.
Would you like to see conversational AI apps on iMessage, or would you prefer separation? Sound off in the comments.
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