Apple has finally delivered the Siri it promised, and the reaction has been strangely muted. The overhauled assistant, which Apple calls Siri AI, arrived in the consumer test version of its iPhone software, iOS 27, in July, after rounds of delays. It now does what Apple pitched at its developer conference in June: it understands your personal context, taps broad world knowledge to answer questions, and surfaces information stored on your phone.
What the new Siri can do
On paper, it is a real upgrade. Apple described Siri AI as “an entirely new version of Siri” woven deeply into the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and its Vision Pro headset, able to act across apps and answer questions about what is on your screen. You can now hold a natural back-and-forth conversation with it, tweak the pace and expressiveness of its voice, type to it instead of talking, and open it as its own app that remembers past chats. Under the hood, the improvements lean on a partnership with Google: Apple used Google's Gemini models to train and refine its own in-house Apple Foundation Models rather than simply rebadging someone else's technology. Apple has said the new assistant will roll out in English first, and that it will not launch in China while it works through local rules, with parts of the European Union restricted at first too.
Impressive, but late
So why the muted reception? The problem, as TechCrunch put it, is timing. “Apple finally has a functional — actually, a fairly impressive — AI assistant, but it's arrived past the time where such a launch feels novel and exciting.” While Apple spent years catching up, the wider AI race sprinted ahead, with tools now writing software and agents completing multi-step tasks; being a capable chatbot is no longer the breakthrough it once was. The verdict is almost backhanded: it feels less like a leap forward and more like Apple fixing a long-broken feature, the way Siri “was meant to work all along.”
For most people the new Siri lands with the full release of iOS 27, expected in September; whether a polished assistant is enough to win back users who have already wandered to rivals is the question Apple now has to answer.
