Apple Is Working to Permit Other Default Virtual Assistants on iOS, but Only in the E.U. ⇥ macrumors.com

Over the weekend, Mark Gurman and Drake Bennett, of Bloomberg, published a lengthy examination of Apple’s fumbling history of artificial intelligence features. It is surprisingly warm to John Giannandrea, who is portrayed as someone who tried hard to build talent and resources at Apple, only to hit walls imposed by other senior leadership figures.

There is a fair bit of news about Siri and Apple Intelligence, which you would know if you read MacRumors because it built four separate articles from various pieces of it. I guess rewriting the whole thing as a single article would have been unethical. Anyway, I thought the one about changing the default virtual assistant was notable:

Apple is planning to give users in the EU the ability to set a default voice assistant other than Siri, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman and Drake Bennett.

[…]

Apple is working on this change in response to expanding EU regulations, the report said.

The way Joe Rossignol phrased this surprised me because I had assumed the DMA already covered default virtual assistant, but it seems that none were designated gatekeepers. I can imagine how difficult it will be for third-party services to act as a drop-in replacement for Siri, too.

Federico Viticci, of MacStories, writing last month about Perplexity’s Voice Assistant feature, a piece which I am chopping up here to make a point but you should read in full anyhow:

[…] Perplexity’s iOS voice assistant isn’t using any “secret” tricks or hidden APIs: they’re simply integrating with existing frameworks and APIs that any third-party iOS developer can already work with. […]

[…] Then there are all the integrations that are exclusive to Siri, which Perplexity can’t implement because Apple doesn’t offer related developer APIs. Only Siri can run shortcuts, set timers, call App Intents, send messages, create notes, open and change device settings, and more. […]

There is a long way to go from this to a full Siri replacement, but I will be hugely envious of those who will be able to take advantage of changing the default. The state of Siri was embarrassing ten years ago. The condition it is in today is a testament to the power of unchangeable defaults and a lack of competition within the iOS universe.

Make no mistake, however: Apple is barely about to “let” E.U. users switch from Siri to something else, as the MacRumors headline claims. It is doing so with the reasonable anticipation Siri’s in-universe monopoly will fall on the wrong side of regulations already established. Good.