Apple's revamped Siri AI has arrived in the consumer beta of iOS 27, released in July 2026, finally delivering the natural-language, context-aware assistant the company promised years ago. The launch matters because it addresses a longstanding weakness in Apple's product line, but arrives after a lengthy delay during which rival AI tools have advanced to handle multi-step tasks, coding and agentic reasoning, making Siri's improvements feel more like a fix to a broken feature than a groundbreaking innovation.

The new Siri can hold natural back-and-forth conversations, be typed to or used via a standalone app, and reference past exchanges. It can search a user's photos, emails, contacts, texts and calendar without precise details, extract information from screenshots such as QR codes or ID numbers, reliably play requested media, and assist with tasks like directions, brainstorming, recipe ideas and bill-splitting via the camera viewfinder. These gains stem from Apple's partnership with Google, using Gemini AI technology to train its own Apple Foundation Models, which run on Apple Silicon and its Private Cloud Compute infrastructure.