The New Siri AI
Thanks to the top-to-bottom revamp that is Siri AI, Siri is reliably intelligent. Finally. We are still in the midst of beta season, and Apple is yet to confirm whether Siri AI will formally launch with iOS 27 in September or sometime later in the year, but the feature is up to scratch. There are bugs and glitches and edge-case quirks, but on the whole, it wipes the floor with old Siri and is competent enough to supplant my everyday usage of other chatbots too.
If a nagging trivia question comes to mind, I turn to Siri AI first. It’s good enough to answer that stuff, and summoning it is way more convenient than opening the ChatGPT app or doing a web search. Apple’s dictation system still feels a bit behind, but the LLM powering new Siri is able to understand most requests sufficiently well, even if the transcribed text is off.
Siri AI is strong at world knowledge, solid at personal context queries and competent at performing actions on your phone … as long as you know what actions it can perform. Ultimately, Siri AI’s ability to be at your bidding depends on the relevant app intents having been built. If they are there, you can pretty reliably depend on Siri being able to find and invoke them appropriately. If they don’t exist, Siri won’t be able to help you. This applies to first-party apps and system settings just as much as it does third-party apps.
Siri AI can get a snapshot of what’s on screen, but it cannot control the UI for you autonomously. As such, if you ask it to do something outside of its library of available app actions, it will say it can’t do that. Often, it can quote the relevant steps for you to do it yourself, but obviously that falls short of the ideal experience. This feels a bit lacklustre to people already embracing AI agents en masse. Claude and Codex on Mac do not hit these walls; they are all too keen to move your mouse for you and run terminal commands until the job is done.
I can envision Apple moving Siri in this direction in the future, but it is wholly absent in this first version. What makes new Siri still highly useful is that there are lot of app intents it can draw on, and it can juggle invoking them much more intelligently than old Siri ever could. I am using Calendar and Reminders more than ever, because Siri now makes it so easy to input new events, update existing ones, and manage my day. If I’m looking at a place I want to go in Maps, I can just tell Siri to add it to my calendar for the weekend and it will do so, without requiring further intervention. Making these entries myself, including all the relevant place metadata and other fields, was simply too laborious a task for me to bother doing so in the past.
New Siri is impressive because LLMs are impressive, and it packages known quantities into a sleek feature with clever system integration. Nothing it does is cutting-edge, but who cares.