Apple plans to release a software update later this year that will make Siri more flexible with third-party messaging apps like WhatsApp, Skype, and Facebook Messenger, the company told Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.

The way Siri typically works is that it listens to the user command when prompted, sends anonymized received speech data to Apple's servers, first converting from audio to plain text, then interpreting the command and sending the result back to the user's iPhone or iPad. The process of performing speech recognition is intensive, and is offloaded from devices to Apple's servers as it isn't necessarily capable of being performed on an item like an iPhone.