Apple began rolling out iOS 27 on Monday, delivering the most consequential rebuild of Siri in the assistant's 15-year history to hundreds of millions of iPhones just as the company's newest handsets reach store shelves. The update, available as a free download for the iPhone 11 and newer, opens a beta waitlist for "Siri AI" — a conversational, context-aware assistant that Apple had promised, then repeatedly delayed, since it was first unveiled at WWDC 2024.
The new Siri is limited to iPhone 15 Pro models and newer, along with recent iPads and Macs running M1 chips or later, because it depends on Apple Intelligence hardware requirements that older devices cannot meet. According to Apple's own announcement, the assistant launches in English first, with French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish support arriving next month. Users must opt in through a waitlist rather than receiving the feature automatically.
Siri AI's headline changes are structural rather than cosmetic. The assistant can now sustain multi-turn conversations, follow up on earlier questions, and read what's visible on a user's screen — for instance, pulling a sports schedule off a website to add an event directly to Calendar. A new "personal context" capability lets Siri draw on a user's messages, emails and photos to answer questions that reference past activity, and a dedicated Siri app keeps conversation history synced across devices via iCloud. The assistant can also act inside third-party apps, including WhatsApp, Audible, Microsoft Outlook and Notability, extending well beyond the read-only Siri most iPhone owners have used for over a decade.
A Google-built backbone
The technical story behind the release is almost as notable as the product itself. Apple built the new Siri's underlying models "in collaboration with Google and its Gemini models," per the company's newsroom post — four of Apple's five new Foundation Models were trained in part on outputs from Google's Gemini systems, and complex queries are processed through Apple's Private Cloud Compute infrastructure, which itself runs partly on Google Cloud hardware fitted with Nvidia and Intel chips. It is an unusual dependency for a company that has spent years building its walled garden, and CNBC reported that Apple's own models remain smaller than rival frontier systems from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, by design, so they can run partly on-device.
The arrangement caps an unusually public two years for Apple's AI ambitions. The company promised a personalized, app-aware Siri at WWDC 2024 as part of the original Apple Intelligence pitch, then delayed it past the iOS 18 launch and into 2026. Tim Cook reportedly lost confidence in the effort during an internal review last year, stripped Siri from then-AI chief John Giannandrea's oversight, and handed it to Vision Pro creator Mike Rockwell; Giannandrea began stepping back from the company in December, with AI researcher Amar Subramanya brought in to lead Apple Foundation Models under software chief Craig Federighi.
Gaps in the rollout
Siri AI is not available everywhere at launch. Apple confirmed the feature will not ship initially in the European Union across iOS, iPadOS or watchOS, citing regulatory requirements under the bloc's Digital Markets Act, and it remains blocked in China while Apple works through separate approval processes there — two of the company's largest markets left waiting for a feature it spent two years promising.
The release lands the same week Apple's iPhone 18 lineup begins appearing in stores, tying its most-delayed software feature to its most important hardware cycle of the year. MacRumors and other outlets tracking the rollout noted that even opted-in users may find themselves on a waitlist before gaining access, suggesting Apple is metering demand on its cloud infrastructure as it did with earlier Apple Intelligence features.
For Apple, the stakes extend beyond a single software update. Siri's overhaul is widely read as a referendum on whether the company can still compete in consumer AI against Google's own Gemini assistant, OpenAI's ChatGPT and Amazon's Alexa+, all of which have shipped comparable conversational features over the past year. With English-only availability, a waitlist gate and two major markets excluded, Apple's answer this week is a first, incomplete step rather than a finished one — full-language and full-region availability are the next things to watch in the coming months.
