CUPERTINO, September 12 — Apple’s CarPlay has become a crowded field for AI chatbots. According to a 9to5Mac report published Friday, September 11, Microsoft’s Copilot is now the sixth major third-party AI chatbot app available on CarPlay, leaving Google Gemini as the last prominent holdout among the leading conversational AI apps. The report, by 9to5Mac Senior Editor Zac Hall, frames Copilot’s arrival as the development that completes a remarkable run of third-party AI integrations on Apple’s in-car platform.
Copilot joins Siri AI, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Perplexity, SpaceXAI’s Grok, Meta AI, and Anthropic’s Claude as CarPlay options.
What Copilot Brings to the Dashboard
The Copilot app is voice-driven and mirrors chat history from the iPhone app, including text-based threads. That means a conversation you started on your phone can continue on your car’s display. The report includes a demonstration of the app in action.
There’s a catch, though. According to the report, Copilot appears to require a subscription to work with CarPlay.
Conversational apps for CarPlay require iOS 26.4 or later, so older iPhones won’t get access without an update.
Siri AI’s Big Week
Starting Monday, CarPlay will include a dedicated Siri AI app, coinciding with the official release of iOS 27 out of beta. Siri AI itself will still be in beta and rolled out in waves, meaning not every user will see it immediately. Think of it like a restaurant opening its doors before the full menu is ready — the app is there, but the kitchen is still working out the timing.
The practical upshot for drivers is a dashboard that increasingly functions as a hub for multiple AI assistants rather than a single voice interface. Whether that’s useful or overwhelming depends on how you use your phone in the car.
What to watch next is whether Google Gemini follows Copilot onto CarPlay, and how Apple manages the coexistence of Siri AI with the third-party chatbots now sharing its screen.
