iOS 26.4 Opens CarPlay to ChatGPT and Gemini as Siri Hits a Wall

It looks like Apple is staying ahead of the game with at least one new AI-adjacent feature in iOS 26.4. Earlier this month, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that Apple was planning to open the door to third-party chatbots on the CarPlay dashboard, and while this wasn’t expected to arrive until iOS 27, the feature is actually slated to roll out with iOS 26.4.

There’s no user-facing sign of it in the first betas that were released this week, but that doesn’t mean the plumbing isn’t already there. Like third-party messaging, mapping, and audio apps, Apple merely blesses the category and provides the necessary frameworks — it’s up to the developers to code in support.

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That means that companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic will have to release updates to their iPhone apps if they want to extend them to CarPlay. When and if they’ll do that remains to be seen, but it seems likely that each of them won’t want to risk their competitors getting onto your dashboard first, so we probably won’t need to wait too long.

Apple has tacitly but officially announced this in an updated version of its CarPlay Developer Guide, which now includes “voice-based conversational apps” alongside other long-standing categories such as audio, communication, EV charging, navigation, parking, and quick food ordering.

This marks the first time Apple has added a new app category to CarPlay since iOS 16 introduced support for fueling and driving task apps. Unsurprisingly, Apple has a few rules about how these new conversational apps will work. For obvious reasons, they’re exempt from the usual requirement that they must use Siri, but they also have to be designed to minimize non-voice interactions to reduce driver distractions. From Apple’s developer guidelines:

1. Voice-based conversational apps must have a primary modality of voice upon launch; and after launch, appropriately respond to questions or requests and perform actions.
2. Only hold an audio session open when voice features are actively being used.
3. Optimize for voice interaction in the driving environment (e.g. don’t show text or imagery in response to queries)
   

Voice-based conversational apps are also limited in the CarPlay user interface, allowing only two levels of navigation (“templates”) below the main screen. That matches fueling apps, and will also align with apps for driving tasks and quick food ordering, which get an extra layer of depth in iOS 26.4.

The templates themselves are also limited to basic UI elements like action sheets, alerts, grids, and lists. This leaves out categories like Now Playing, Contacts, and Maps that are available to other app categories, although Apple will allow them to present a “point of interest” screen to show a list of nearby locations accompanied by a mini-map with pins. This means apps like ChatGPT will be able to show you where the nearest coffee shops or gas stations are.

While this may sound a bit restrictive at first, it’s not atypical of how most other CarPlay apps work, and the goal here is to allow an AI chatbot like Gemini or ChatGPT to respond to voice requests and show a limited amount of information on the screen in response.

Apple is also updating its CarPlay voice control template in iOS 26.4 to provide better support for conversational apps. While the template already exists to support voice-based navigation apps, the new version will add support for up to four action buttons to perform tasks related to the current conversation, such as making a phone call, sending a message, or opening a navigation app to get directions to a suggested location.

As Gurman said when he first shared news of this feature, we also won’t quite be able to replace Siri with another chatbot — at least not yet. The button in your car that activates Siri can’t be reassigned to anything else, and there’s no support for other wake words beyond “Hey Siri” or “Siri.” It looks like calling up alternative chatbots will require you to launch them manually from the CarPlay screen.

Although we’d hoped it would be more open, Apple is still being Apple here; the company recently allowed the Side button to trigger other voice assistants in Japan, but that was only because legislation forced it to, and there’s no sign of that feature expanding to other regions.

As for when we’ll see ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude on our dashboard, it’s unlikely to happen before iOS 26.4 is released to the public sometime in late March or early April. That’s because developers aren’t typically allowed to embrace new capabilities in their App Store-published apps while those features are still in beta. However, they can start working on them right away, so it’s conceivably possible that CarPlay-compatible versions could show up pretty quickly after iOS 26.4 launches. We saw Google do that with Google Maps when iOS 12 opened the door to third-party navigation apps, so it makes us hopeful that it will follow suit with Gemini, and prompt its rivals to do the same to keep up.

Lastly, while voice-based conversational apps are by far the most exciting new category, it’s worth mentioning that iOS 26.4 also adds public safety apps to the mix. However, these aren’t for general consumption, as they’re restricted to apps used by firefighters, law enforcement, ambulance, and other public safety organizations that handle things like dispatch, routing, and vehicle and location search.