Apple's Siri Finally Gets a Chatbot Brain, Two Years After It Was First Promised

The new Siri arrives with today's iPhone software update as a test version behind a waitlist, built with help from Google's AI models. It can search your own messages and email, act on what is on your screen, and hold a real conversation. It only works on recent iPhones, only in English, and not in Europe or China.

Apple released iOS 27 today, the yearly update to the software that runs the iPhone, and with it the rebuilt Siri it has been promising since June 2024. Apple calls it Siri AI. It is what the old Siri never was: a chatbot, the same kind of program as ChatGPT, that can hold a conversation, remember what you said earlier, and act across your apps.

The examples Apple gives are the everyday kind. Ask what your family was planning this weekend, and it searches your messages to find the plan, pulls up the related email, and adds the ingredients to your grocery list. Point the phone at a concert poster and it creates the calendar event. Ask it to draft an email and it writes one in your own style. There is also a Siri app for the first time, so you can look back at earlier conversations instead of starting from nothing each time.

Two details are worth knowing. First, it is not entirely Apple's work. In its own announcement, Apple says the models underneath were built "in collaboration with Google and its Gemini models." The company that has spent years selling itself as the private alternative to Google is, for the brains of its assistant, leaning on Google. Apple's answer is that the heavy lifting runs either on the phone itself or on what it calls Private Cloud Compute, its own servers, designed so that personal data is not stored. Second, it is a test. It arrives labeled a beta, you have to join a waitlist in Settings to get it, it only works in English for now, and it requires an iPhone 15 Pro or newer. It is not available at all in the European Union or China while Apple works through those regions' rules.

The long road here is its own story. Apple showed this Siri on stage in June 2024 and said it was on the way. In March 2025 it admitted the features were not ready and would take another year. In the meantime rivals shipped chatbots, then chatbots that could act, while the iPhone kept the Siri it had. The delay became a running joke and, inside the industry, a genuine question about whether Apple could build this at all. Today's answer is that it could, with help.

For most people this is the day AI actually arrives on their phone, not as an app they have to go find, but as the button they already press. Whether it is any good is something a waitlist means most of us will find out from someone else first.