Siri made its debut on the iPhone in 2011, five years ahead of Google Assistant and 11 years before ChatGPT would open up to the public. Despite the head start, Apple’s voice AI has been comprehensively overtaken in recent years, and made to look rather primitive compared to the many generative AI rivals it’s now up against.
With the launch of iOS 27, Apple and Siri are fighting back. There’s a new name—Siri AI—and a host of new capabilities that are coming to your iPhone.
These are the new features that you’ll be able to make use of once iOS 27 appears on your handset, if you’re running the iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone 15 Pro Max or later (including, of course, the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone Duo). Only these latest phones have the necessary on-board silicon to meet the higher AI processing demands.
Get More Personal Context
You’ll notice when Siri AI arrives that it spends some time indexing everything on your iPhone. That’s so it can dig deep into your texts, emails, calendars, and whatever else you have stored on your phone (everything is kept on-device though—nothing gets sent back to Apple).
It means you can ask natural questions about text conversations, email interactions, and appointments—”What day is my work appraisal happening?” for example, or “Where did I say I’d meet Mom?”—and get informed, personalized answers back, based on what’s already stored in your apps.
This works for photos and videos as well. Open up the Photos app and you’re able to ask Siri AI to show you all the pictures of your pet, or the images you took on your last vacation, or all the photos of trees you’ve collected, via simple, conversational prompts.
Ask About Anything on the Screen
Siri AI knows what you’re looking at while you’re using your iPhone—perhaps even better than you do. Whereas before you would’ve had to take a screenshot and give it to Siri to look at, now you can just ask.
So if you’re on the web in Safari, you can say “Hey Siri” and then get it to summarize the text onscreen or identify a landmark in an image in an online article. You can ask what certain options mean in Settings, or look up more details about a game you’re thinking about downloading from the App Store.
The same sort of visual processing is available through the iOS Camera app too: Just switch to Siri mode using the selector by the shutter button, and ask Siri AI about anything that’s in view (nutritional information about an item on a menu, for instance).
Siri AI can see what you see.
Courtesy of David Nield
Write and Edit Text Anywhere
The old Siri could generate text for you, but it offloaded the job to an integrated ChatGPT plug-in. With Siri AI, no third-party help is needed, and you can use it for things like text messages and emails.
Just call up Siri AI by saying “Hey Siri” or tapping on the Write with Siri link, then tell it what you want to say or describe the edits you’d like it to make. You can instruct it to make your messages sound more or less formal, to expand or shorten sections of text, or to turn quick notes into full paragraphs and sentences.
