Apple’s goal for its Apple Intelligence-based Siri is to give it the ability to control apps through voice commands, but will be limited at launch, and may never control banking apps.
It’s previously been reported that Apple had opened up Siri to developers specifically so that it would become more context aware when a user makes a request. That would be via the increasingly important app intents system, and now Bloomberg says that having Siri control apps by voice is the real focus of Apple’s development work.
Siri can already open apps and achieve a degree of further control by having voice commands trigger Shortcuts. But reportedly the ambition now is for a user to be able to do everything from editing photos, buying items, or adding social media comments, all without touching the iPhone screen.
It’s claimed that Apple is already testing this functionality across a series of popular third-party apps, such as Uber, Amazon, YouTube, Facebook and others. Apple is also building this into its own apps, plus some selected games.
Reportedly, the feature will either exclude or at least limit the control of banking, financial and other sensitive apps, perhaps including health. That’s because the feature has to be entirely and constantly reliable, and Apple will not be rolling it out to all apps at once.
The report claims that this use of Siri is enormously significant, and specifically that it is vastly more important than the promised ability to ask Siri the name of someone a user has forgotten. But that promise was a rare demonstration of AI being used for something people would actually do.
Opening an app by asking for it would be nice, and it has accessibility benefits. But it can already be done and this extension to controlling all of an app’s features is just that, an extension instead of something new.
It would turn the iPhone and Siri into a “Star Trek”-like device, and it could be an impressively fast way of using devices. But Apple needs to show us a reason to want Apple Intelligence, and “what’s the name of the guy I met that time” is what would persuade more people than a quicker way to leave a sarky comment on Facebook.
Perhaps an improved search facility would help, too. The latest reports are that Siri may gain ChatGPT-like search powers in the first half of 2026.
