Apple executives insist they aren’t building a public-facing chatbot, yet the iOS 26 developer beta all but proves otherwise. A new Shortcuts action called Use Model pipes any prompt straight into Apple Intelligence and answers in conversational prose, giving users a do-it-yourself chat interface with just a few taps.
To use the supposed chatbot, open Shortcuts, add the Use Model action, choose a model, type a prompt, and run. Responses appear instantly in the flow and can be forwarded to Notes, displayed as notifications, or chained into further automations. Two model options exist:
- On This iPhone: Tuns entirely on-device for speed and privacy, but struggles with long, creative queries.
- Private Cloud Compute: Taps Apple’s servers for a larger model that handles nuanced prompts, but needs connectivity.
If the local model balks, the shortcut offers to retry in the cloud. In tests, the cloud version matched GPT-3.5 for brainstorming and summarizing, yet it still hallucinated, inventing Renaissance scholars who “rediscovered” Aristotle’s lost works. It also enforced guardrails, refusing to forge a doctor’s note even when framed as fiction. And if you’ve got ChatGPT installed, the chatbot appears as an AI option in the list as well.
Not Quite ChatGPT, Yet Close Enough
The shortcut lacks chat history, memory, or a personality system, but in AppleInsider’s testing, it handled creative writing, summarization, brainstorming, and text simplification about as well as GPT-3.5. It also refused certain ethically dubious prompts, such as forging a doctor’s note, showing that Apple’s guardrails are active. Hallucinations remain an issue: asked for Aristotle’s “lost and rediscovered works,” the model invented titles and Renaissance anecdotes that never existed.
Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak claim that Apple is focused on “features, not chatbots,” but the new action behaves like a lightweight chat app in everything but name. Users control the prompt, the model, and the destination of each reply, no Siri or separate app required.
Whether Apple eventually ships a branded chat product or keeps conversational AI tucked inside Shortcuts, the beta shows the company is already comfortable letting people talk to its language model. Labels aside, if it talks like a chatbot and users treat it like one, Apple’s semantics may not matter.