Apple’s smart home hub, called HomeView in its code, may be getting room for AI chatbots. The iOS 27.3 beta contains a flag for a category named “Conversational Apps”, which suggests assistants such as ChatGPT or Claude could one day run on the device. Apple has announced neither the feature nor a date.
The flag has no description, so what counts as a conversational app is a guess. A developer who posts as pdfu on X found that the same beta also supports two-way audio routing and session handling, though pdfu says the code is “still not fully wired up”.
If “Conversational Apps” does mean third-party chatbots, it would put them on a hub that people talk to from across a room, which is a different job from a chat window on a phone. That is an inference from a flag name, though, and Apple could rename, shelve or limit it. Separately, another report today says Apple wants Siri itself to work more like an agent as soon as next year, so the company is clearly thinking about how assistants should behave around the home and elsewhere.
The beta also tightens the hub’s security. After three wrong unlock attempts the user would have to confirm their identity on an iPhone, and repeat lockouts would escalate from one hour to eight.
HomeView has appeared in Apple’s code before. Earlier this month, strings in a build pointed to a built-in security camera mode. Code in a beta often describes features that are cut, delayed or changed before release, so none of this is a promise.
