Apple is still hard at work on becoming a relevant player in AI. The latest missive from Mark Gurman at suggests that Apple is shifting its artificial intelligence goals to center on new device segments. Sources reportedly told the publication that Apple has a slate of new smart home products in the works that could help pivot its lagging AI strategy.

The center of the new lineup is a tabletop AI companion that has been described as an iPad on a movable robotic arm. It would be able to swivel to face the screen toward a user as they move around their home or office. Sources said the current prototype uses a horizontal display that’s about seven inches while the motorized arm can move the screen about six inches away from the base in any direction. Equipped with a to the Siri voice assistant, this device could act like an additional person, recalling information, making suggestions and participating in conversations. According to Bloomberg, Apple is targeting a 2027 release for this product.

Apple’s new lineup is also rumored to include a smart home hub that is a simpler version of the robotic friend with no moving stand. We might be seeing this sooner, with a projected 2026 release for the device. This hub device would be able to control music playback, take notes, browse the web and host videoconferencing. Both the robot companion and the smart home hub are reportedly running a new operating system called Charismatic that’s designed to support multiple users. The Siri running on the device will be given a particularly cheery personality, and it may also be getting a visual representation. Bloomberg‘s sources said there hasn’t been a final decision on aesthetics; internal tests have had Siri looking like an animated Finder icon and like a Memoji.

Today’s scuttlebutt follows on previous reports from Gurman that pointed to Apple’s interest in these categories. The idea of a smart home hub was apparently floated at the company as far back as 2022, and it’s finally being to have a formal debut some time this year. Robots have also been a topic of interest in Cupertino for some time, with claims that Apple was developing a personal robot dating back . While this Bloomberg piece offers more detail about those hypothetical plans, there’s always a chance Apple will change direction or scrap a project.

Apple is hiring engineers for an “Answers, Knowledge, and Information” team that is working on improving Siri, Spotlight, Safari, and more.

As of writing, Apple’s careers website has more than a dozen job listings for the team across the U.S. and China. For example, Apple is looking to hire a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to help with “improving Siri’s ability to answer personal domain questions.” The job listing says the team develops large language models that are “responsible for answering users’ questions using their personal documents with privacy at the forefront.”

That sounds a lot like Apple’s personalized Siri features, which were delayed until 2026. However, Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman says there is more at play here.

In his Power On newsletter today, Gurman said he was told that the team is in the early stages of developing a “new ChatGPT-like search experience,” and it is apparently even exploring a “standalone app” for such functionality.

“While still in early stages, the team is building what it calls an ‘answer engine’ — a system capable of crawling the web to respond to general-knowledge questions,” wrote Gurman. “A standalone app is currently under exploration, alongside new back-end infrastructure meant to power search capabilities in future versions of Siri, Spotlight and Safari.”

Gurman previously reported that Apple was developing a more conversational version of Siri, but he said that it was delayed until at least iOS 27. This would be a more ChatGPT-like version of Siri that is powered by a large language model.

For now, the only thing that Apple has announced is the more personalized version of Siri, which will have better understanding of a user’s personal context, on-screen awareness, and deeper per-app controls. For example, Apple showed an iPhone user asking Siri about their mother’s flight and lunch reservation plans based on info from the Mail and Messages apps. Evidently, though, it looks like Apple has even bigger ChatGPT-like ambitions.

At this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC 25), Apple announced a slew of updates to its operating systems, services, and software, including a new look it dubbed “Liquid Glass” and a rebranded naming convention. Apple was notably quiet on one highly anticipated product: a more personalized, AI-powered Siri, which it first introduced at last year’s conference.

Apple’s SVP of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, only gave the Siri update a brief mention during the keynote address, saying, “As we’ve shared, we’re continuing our work to deliver the features that make Siri even more personal. This work needed more time to reach our high-quality bar, and we look forward to sharing more about it in the coming year.”

The time frame of “coming year” seems to indicate that Apple won’t have news before 2026. That’s a significant delay in the AI era, where new models, updates, and upgrades ship at a rapid pace.

First announced at WWDC 24, the more personalized Siri is expected to bring artificial intelligence updates to the beleaguered virtual assistant built into iPhone and other Apple devices. At the time, the company hyped it as the “next big step for Apple” and said Siri would be able to understand your “personal context,” like your relationships, communications, routine, and more.

Plus, the assistant was going to be more useful by allowing you to take action within and across your apps.

While Bloomberg reported that the in-development version of the more personalized Siri was functional, it was not consistently working properly. The report said its quality issues meant Siri only performed as it should two-thirds of the time, making it not viable to ship.

Apple officially announced in March it was pushing back the launch, saying the Siri update would take longer to deliver than anticipated. The company also pulled SVP of Machine Learning and AI Strategy John Giannandrea off the Siri project and put Mike Rockwell, who had worked on the Vision Pro, in charge.

The shake-up indicated the company was trying to get back on track after stumbling on a major release. It also suggested Apple’s AI technology was behind that of rivals, like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, worrying investors.

In the meantime, Apple partnered with OpenAI to help close the gap; when users asked Siri questions the assistant couldn’t answer, those could be directed to ChatGPT instead. With the upcoming release, iOS 26, Apple has updated its AI image generation app, Image Playground, to use ChatGPT as well.

At this year’s WWDC, the company continued to make other AI promises, including developer access to the on-device foundation models, live translation, upgrades to Genmoji (in addition to aforementioned Image Playground), Visual Intelligence improvements, an AI “Workout Buddy” for Apple Watch, AI in Xcode, and the introduction of an updated, AI-powered version of its Shortcuts app for scripting and automation.