Apple Allows Third-Party AI Assistants in CarPlay for the First Time

According to Bloomberg, Apple plans to add additional AI features to CarPlay. Apple will enable third-party chatbot apps to interact with CarPlay, making AI services such as Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT available in the car for the first time.

While CarPlay does support third-party apps, the available options are limited. Currently, companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI cannot create CarPlay apps, leaving customers to use Siri voice controls in the vehicle.

CarPlay users can now utilize apps like ChatGPT to ask questions hands-free. However, these apps cannot operate the vehicle or iPhone features. Third-party AI speech apps will not replace Siri and need users to launch an app to use chatbot. App developers will be able to create in-car experiences that initiate a voice-based chat mode when the app launches, streamlining the process.

Apple plans to support third-party AI apps “within the coming months,” potentially coinciding with the launch of a smarter Siri. Apple’s iOS 26.4 introduces a more personalized Siri with huge language models.

Siri will be able to answer difficult inquiries, complete multi-step tasks, preserve continuity, and perform more across apps. The personal assistant will also get a World Knowledge Answers feature, which will allow it to search on the web and summarize knowledge from various places.

In iOS 27, Siri will gain complete chatbot skills to compete with Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT.