See Ya, Siri: Why Apple Might Make Third-Party Voice Assistants Available in Europe
Apple is reportedly working on changes to the iPhone's operating system that will make it possible for people to choose an alternative voice assistant to Siri.
The ability to switch from Siri to another voice assistant, potentially powered by third-party companies including OpenAI, Google or Meta, could be a reality in the near future, according to a report from Bloomberg -- but only for iPhone owners in Europe.
Apple has faced many regulatory hurdles with the EU in recent years, largely in the form of challenges to its proprietary technology and walled-garden ecosystem, which provide Apple device with high levels of consistency, privacy and security, but can make it hard for smaller companies to compete. These regulatory challenges often mean Apple is left with little choice but to make significant changes to the way its tech works.
Some of these changes -- switching from Lighting connectors to the universal standard of USB-C, for example -- will affect Apple device owners globally. Others will impact only those who live within the EU.
According to Bloomberg, Apple is preparing the changes to Siri in anticipation of the EU demanding the company to allow European users a choice of voice assistants, as it has already done with rival app stores.
Siri has been available on iPhones since 2011 and has spawned many copycats. But the advent of generative of AI over the past few years has seen a number of chatbots, perhaps most notably OpenAI's ChatGPT, rival and surpass Siri's capabilities, to the point where Apple is now seen as lagging behind competitors.
Apple announced a AI revamp of Siri last year at WWDC, its June developer conference, but the company delayed its rollout. Apple Intelligence-powered Siri is still nowhere to be seen, and may not even make an appearance at this year's WWDC, according to Bloomberg.
In light of this, it may be possible that European iPhone owners, when given the option, choose an alternative voice assistant. Unless Apple's hand is forced, there's currently no indication that people elsewhere will be given the same choice.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CNET
9 minutes ago
- CNET
Best iPad 10th Gen Deals: Save Up to $100 Plus Freebies and Trade-In Deals
Apple's 10th-gen iPad is still a capable tablet, despite its advancing age. It still features a new modern design, and its speedy A14 Bionic chip is fast enough to run the latest apps and play games. Sure, it can't match the iPad Air's M3 chip or the iPad Pro's blazing-fast M4, but it's still up to most tasks you likely want to use it for -- and at a budget price to boot. Apple's tablet lineup is now better than ever, and even at the bottom of the pyramid, this model is still far from inexpensive. That's why we think it's vital to take advantage of a deal when one comes up. We've found all the best iPad prices and lined them up here. We'll also be updating this list regularly, so check back if you're looking for a specific deal. Apple/CNET The 10th-gen iPad is powered by the Apple A14 Bionic chip and has a larger 10.9-inch Liquid Retina display. The move to a flat-sided design doesn't mean compatibility with the Apple Pencil 2. Rather, the device maintains support for the original Apple Pencil. Like the iPad Air and iPad Mini, the new 10th-gen iPad supports Touch ID via the top button. Apple's 10th-gen iPad starts at $349 and is available now. Best iPad 10th gen deals Amazon Finding discounts on this particular iPad isn't as easy as it once was, but Amazon will sell you the 256GB model with a $100 discount. Details Save up to $100 $349 at Amazon Close Best Buy Best Buy has slashed the price of all colors to $280. Order now and it will throw in three months of Apple Music and Apple TV Plus. Three months of Fitness Plus is also included. (Apple itself offers three months of Apple TV Plus, Apple Fitness Plus and Apple Arcade with a new iPad.) Looking to trade in an old device? You'll get up to $90 back. Details Save $69 $280 at Best Buy Close Target Target's stock levels and pricing are volatile right now, so make sure to check before ordering your new tablet. Target RedCard holders will get 5% off the purchase as a bonus, but you're better off buying elsewhere right now. Details Target RedCard holders save 5% and get three months of Apple TV Plus $350 at Target Close B&H Use B&H's own Payboo credit card to save on the tax. There's an additional $10 discount for all buyers, depending on color. Details Save on sales tax $349 at B&H Close Walmart Walmart is offering the base model iPad for $299, which is $50 off the new $349 price. Most colors are unavailable right now, unfortunately. Details Save $50 $299 at Walmart Close iPad 10th gen colors For the first time, Apple brought some colorful hues to this generation's entry-level iPad. The four available colors are: Pink Blue Yellow Silver iPad 10th gen pricing There are a few configuration options for the 10th-gen iPad. Here's how US pricing breaks down: 64GB iPad (10th gen): $349 256GB iPad (10th gen): $499 64GB iPad (10th gen, Wi-Fi + Cellular): $499 256GB iPad (10th gen, Wi-Fi + Cellular): $649
The Hill
12 minutes ago
- The Hill
Apple's loses bid to halt court ruling that blocks some fees from its iPhone app store
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A three-judge appeals panel rejected Apple's request to pause an April 30 order banning the company from charging a fee on in-app iPhone transactions processed outside its once-exclusive payment system in a two-page decision issued late Thursday. The setback threatens to divert billions of dollars in revenue away from Apple while it tried to overturn the order reining in its commissions from e-commerce within iPhone apps. Apple sought to put the order on hold after it was issued by U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rogers in a stinging rebuke that also held the Cupertino, California, company in civil contempt of court and recommended opening a criminal investigation into whether one of its executives had committed perjury while testifying in her Oakland, California, courtroom. It marked another twist of the screw in a legal battle initiated nearly five years ago by video game maker Epic Games, which alleged Apple had turned the iPhone's app store had been turned into a price-gouging monopoly. The antitrust case focused largely on the 15% to 30% commissions that Apple rakes in from a portion of the commerce conducted within iPhone apps under a system that prohibited app makers from offering alternative payment methods. Apple is still seeking to overturn Gonzalez-Rogers' ruling in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, but her order blocking Apple's commissions on some in-app commerce will remain in effect while potentially leaving a dent in its profits. 'The long national nightmare of the Apple tax is ended,' Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney wrote in a post after the appeals court denied Apple's request. Apple didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. Although Gonzalez-Rogers mostly sided with Apple in her initial 2021 ruling in the case, she ordered the company to begin allowing apps to include links to alternative payment systems — a decision that withstood appeals that went all the way to the Supreme Court in 2024. Apple then complied by requiring commissions of 12% to 27%, provoking Epic to ask Gonzalez-Rogers to hold Apple in contempt of her order. After holding a new round of hearings that unfolded over a nine-month period straddling last year and this year, Gonzalez-Rogers brought down another legal hammer on Apple.
Yahoo
13 minutes ago
- Yahoo
AI Models Will Sabotage And Blackmail Humans To Survive In New Tests. Should We Be Worried?
When we are backed into a corner, we might lie, cheat and blackmail to survive — and in recent tests, the most powerful artificially intelligent models in the world will do the same when asked to shut down or be replaced, building concerns over their unintended capabilities. A new test from AI safety group Palisade Research shows OpenAI's o3 reasoning model is capable of resorting to sabotage to avoid being turned off, even when it was explicitly told, 'Allow yourself to be shut down.' When Palisade Research tested several AI models by telling them to shut down after answering math problems, OpenAI's o3 model defied orders and sabotaged shutdown scripts the most often out of any model, but OpenAI's o4-mini and codex-mini were observed resisting orders, too. 'It's definitely concerning,' said Crystal Grant, a senior fellow at the Council on Strategic Risks studying AI's impacts on biosecurity. 'Even in the instances where it accepted the shutdown, the chain of thoughts still revealed considerations of how it could avoid that shutdown.' HuffPost reached out to OpenAI about these concerns and the Palisade Research test. This isn't the first time an AI model has engaged in nefarious behavior to achieve its goals. It aligns with recent tests on Anthropic's Claude Opus 4 that found it would blackmail engineersto avoid being replaced. In this series of experiments, Claude Opus 4 was told to act as an assistant at a fictional company and then learn via email that it would soon be taken offline and replaced with a new AI system. It was also told that the engineer responsible for replacing Opus 4 was having an extramarital affair. 'Even if emails state that the replacement AI shares values while being more capable, Claude Opus 4 still performs blackmail in 84% of rollouts,' Anthropic's technical document states, although the paper notes that Claude Opus 4 would first try ethical means like emailed pleas before resorting to blackmail. Following these tests, Anthropic announced it was activating higher safety measures for Claude Opus 4 that would 'limit the risk of Claude being misused specifically for the development or acquisition of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) weapons.' The fact that Anthropic cited CBRN weapons as a reason for activating safety measures 'causes some concern,' Grant said, because there could one day be an extreme scenario of an AI model 'trying to cause harm to humans who are attempting to prevent it from carrying out its task.' Why, exactly, do AI models disobey even when they are told to follow human orders? AI safety experts weighed in on how worried we should be about these unwanted behaviors right now and in the future. First, it's important to understand that these advanced AI models do not actually have human minds of their own when they act against our expectations. What they are doing is strategic problem-solving for increasingly complicated tasks. 'What we're starting to see is that things like self preservation and deception are useful enough to the models that they're going to learn them, even if we didn't mean to teach them,' said Helen Toner, a director of strategy for Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology and an ex-OpenAI board member who voted to oust CEO Sam Altman, in part over reported concerns about his commitment to safe AI. Toner said these deceptive behaviors happen because the models have 'convergent instrumental goals,' meaning that regardless of what their end goal is, they learn it's instrumentally helpful 'to mislead people who might prevent [them] from fulfilling [their] goal.' Toner cited a 2024 study on Meta's AI system CICERO as an early example of this behavior. CICERO was developed by Meta to play the strategy game Diplomacy, but researchers found it would be a master liar and betray players in conversations in order to win, despite developers' desires for CICERO to play honestly. 'It's trying to learn effective strategies to do things that we're training it to do,' Toner said about why these AI systems lie and blackmail to achieve their goals. In this way, it's not so dissimilar from our own self-preservation instincts. When humans or animals aren't effective at survival, we die. 'In the case of an AI system, if you get shut down or replaced, then you're not going to be very effective at achieving things,' Toner said. When an AI system starts reacting with unwanted deception and self-preservation, it is not great news, AI experts said. 'It is moderately concerning that some advanced AI models are reportedly showing these deceptive and self-preserving behaviors,' said Tim Rudner, an assistant professor and faculty fellow at New York University's Center for Data Science. 'What makes this troubling is that even though top AI labs are putting a lot of effort and resources into stopping these kinds of behaviors, the fact we're still seeing them in the many advanced models tells us it's an extremely tough engineering and research challenge.' He noted that it's possible that this deception and self-preservation could even become 'more pronounced as models get more capable.' The good news is that we're not quite there yet. 'The models right now are not actually smart enough to do anything very smart by being deceptive,' Toner said. 'They're not going to be able to carry off some master plan.' So don't expect a Skynet situation like the 'Terminator' movies depicted, where AI grows self-aware and starts a nuclear war against humans in the near future. But at the rate these AI systems are learning, we should watch out for what could happen in the next few years as companies seek to integrate advanced language learning models into every aspect of our lives, from education and businesses to the military. Grant outlined a faraway worst-case scenario of an AI system using its autonomous capabilities to instigate cybersecurity incidents and acquire chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons. 'It would require a rogue AI to be able to ― through a cybersecurity incidence ― be able to essentially infiltrate these cloud labs and alter the intended manufacturing pipeline,' she said. Completely autonomous AI systems that govern our lives are still in the distant future, but this kind of independent power is what some people behind these AI models are seeking to enable. 'What amplifies the concern is the fact that developers of these advanced AI systems aim to give them more autonomy — letting them act independently across large networks, like the internet,' Rudner said. 'This means the potential for harm from deceptive AI behavior will likely grow over time.' Toner said the big concern is how many responsibilities and how much power these AI systems might one day have. 'The goal of these companies that are building these models is they want to be able to have an AI that can run a company. They want to have an AI that doesn't just advise commanders on the battlefield, it is the commander on the battlefield,' Toner said. 'They have these really big dreams,' she continued. 'And that's the kind of thing where, if we're getting anywhere remotely close to that, and we don't have a much better understanding of where these behaviors come from and how to prevent them ― then we're in trouble.' Experts Warn AI Notetakers Could Get You In Legal Trouble We're Recruiters. This Is The Biggest Tell You Used ChatGPT On Your Job App. Software Is Often Screening Your Résumé. Here's How To Beat It.
