Despite being the first company with a virtual assistant, I think we all can agree that Siri hasn’t aged well. In the last five years, it’s been outperformed and essentially lapped in its capabilities and reliability. Apple has been aware of it and has been attempting to get it up to snuff. Today, at WWDC, Apple may have achieved what they’ve been attempting to do for a while now by making Siri great again.
They’ve partnered with Google to utilize its Gemini AI to power Apple’s Foundation model of which will fuel Siri to be the new cornerstone of its Apple Intelligence suite of features. It’s now called Siri AI and arrives in the form of a dedicated app. Siri appears to be more capable and conversational than previous versions of the AI assistant—finally. The new Siri AI can do things including brainstorm ideas, have natural conversations, ask open-ended questions, take a selfie, create reminders, make phone calls, rotate photos, create new calendar events, send emails, create notes, play/resume media, add photos to albums, and have voice dictation built into the keyboard.
The new Siri UI pops out of the Dynamic Island or Dynamic Island area (for older and budget iPhones), as we previously reported. However, you can still long press the Power button to access it as well. You can make adjustments to Siri’s voice in pitch, speed, tone, and accent and utilize it for queries and searches via Visual Intelligence, which is also coming to visionOS, in addition to iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS.
The Siri app also retains a history of your conversations, which are backed up in the app and, in addition, in iCloud. The Siri AI will launch later this year in beta and will be available in English at first, with more countries coming soon. Unfortunately, due to the Digital Markets Act (DMA), Siri AI will be delayed in the European Union with the release of iOS 27 and iPadOS 27. The company didn’t reveal a timeline of when it could arrive in Europe, so it could be a while.
