After rounds of delays, Siri AI arrived in the consumer beta build of iOS 27, launched in July. The AI assistant now does what Apple promised: It understands your personal context, taps into broad world knowledge to answer your questions, and surfaces relevant information stored on your iPhone.
And yet, the arrival feels somewhat anticlimactic. Apple finally has a functional — actually, a fairly impressive — AI assistant, but it’s arrived past the time where such a launch feels novel and exciting.
If anything, the AI race has surged ahead in the months and years Apple has dawdled on AI. Today, AI tools are coding and building software, AI agents are completing multistep tasks, and AI is working alongside you, using your computer, reasoning, thinking, remembering, creating media, and more. Being a functional chatbot or AI helper isn’t the breakthrough that it once would have been.
That is not to say Apple’s Siri AI isn’t valuable or useful. With Siri AI’s launch, Apple delivered on its promises and then some.
You can now have natural, back-and-forth conversations with Siri, which has settings that let you tweak the expressivity and pacing of its voice responses. You can also type to the assistant, if you choose, or use it via a dedicated app for the first time, referencing past conversations.
The assistant can understand your personal context, helping you find things like photos, emails, contacts, texts, or calendar appointments — even when you’re not quite sure what you’re looking for or where. For instance, you could ask it to pull up the last receipt you saved on your iPhone, without saying where it was stored or what the receipt was for, and Siri will find it for you.
You can also ask it about things you’ve saved only as a photo, like your driver’s license number from a pic of your license, or a QR code you screenshotted to reference later, as a reminder to visit someone’s website. You can launch websites and use apps via Siri, doing things like getting directions, playing music, editing a photo, drafting an email, playing your audiobooks, and much more.
Thankfully, Siri now consistently and accurately plays the song, podcast, or audiobook you request on your preferred app — a low bar to be sure, but one where Siri stumbled before.
Siri can brainstorm with you, too. Among other things, it can help you refine ideas, learn about a new topic, or explore a recipe — like suggesting something you can make with your random ingredients in your fridge! You can ask when your favorite band is playing or when a particular event is, and Siri answers correctly, giving you the information you need, based on your location.
You can use Siri in the camera’s viewfinder to learn about things in the real world or to help you split a restaurant bill with your friends.
In short, it’s exactly what you always hoped Siri would be: a useful assistant that lets you use your iPhone easily, just by talking, and one that can answer questions of any sort instead of shuffling you off to the web.
These improvements were made possible by Apple’s partnership with Google for the use of its Gemini AI models. Apple didn’t just slap its name on Gemini AI; it used Google’s technology to train and refine its own proprietary Apple Foundation Models. The result is AI models designed to run on Apple’s own silicon and on its private cloud compute infrastructure and actually work.
Yet, despite finally delivering a functional, helpful version of Siri, it feels almost like Apple fixed a long-standing bug — a forever-broken Siri — rather than doing something revolutionary here. This is how Siri was meant to work all along. The only marvel is that, after so many years of failing to perform tasks correctly, it actually works.
The general public who don’t run beta builds on their devices will gain access to the new Siri when Apple officially releases iOS 27, expected in September.
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Sarah has worked as a reporter for TechCrunch since August 2011. She joined the company after having previously spent over three years at ReadWriteWeb. Prior to her work as a reporter, Sarah worked in I.T. across a number of industries, including banking, retail and software.
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