Apple is opening up its biggest-ever Siri overhaul to a broader audience with the release of the iOS 27 public beta, giving everyday users the chance to try out the new AI assistant ahead of its broader launch later this fall.
The public beta marks the first time Apple has made its AI-powered Siri widely available beyond developers. With some 2.5 billion active devices worldwide, even if only a fraction of users install the public beta, it will still represent the largest test of Apple’s redesigned AI assistant and its answer to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and others.
The Siri AI update, which was officially announced at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June, turns Apple’s aging voice assistant into a more capable, AI-powered tool that can access information on a user’s device, including emails, photos, and messages, as well as respond to what’s on the screen and ground its answers in world knowledge, similar to any modern-day AI chatbot.
It’s also more deeply integrated across the operating system. It can be accessed by saying “Hey Siri” or by pressing the side button, as before, as well as by swiping down from the Dynamic Island (the black bar at the top of the screen). Plus, it’s integrated into the iPhone’s built-in search engine tool, Spotlight, making it more powerful than before because it can search for answers to almost any question.
For the first time, Siri has also been given its own standalone app, a user experience that people already comfortable with chatbots like ChatGPT or Gemini may prefer. However, because Siri is so deeply integrated throughout the iPhone, accessing it via an app seems somewhat unnecessary.
In addition to iOS 27 on iPhone, the upgraded Siri is available across all other Apple products, including iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, CarPlay, AirPods, Apple TV, and Vision Pro.
Under the hood, Siri AI leverages Apple Intelligence, including Apple’s new Foundation Models that run on the device and use its Private Cloud Compute. Apple built its Foundation Models in collaboration with Google and its Gemini model, but these models are not just some rebranded version of Gemini. Instead, Apple’s models were built specifically for its Apple Silicon using proprietary data, and distilled Google’s Gemini — a process that uses Gemini to create smaller, highly efficient models built into iOS and other Apple software. Meanwhile, Private Cloud Compute ensures that users’ personal data isn’t stored or accessible to Apple.
In early tests of the developer version of Siri AI, the assistant was able to better handle basic tasks on the phone, like finding certain photos in your Photo Library, summarizing group texts, adding an appointment sent via text to your calendar, looking up nutritional information about what’s in your camera view. It was also better at responding to questions you would normally have to search the web to answer, such as when an upcoming local event is happening, or what’s happening in the news.
In the developer beta, Siri sometimes threw error messages or got confused. (For instance, I once asked Siri for the latest news about Iran, and it searched my contacts for someone with that name.)
However, it’s easy to see Siri becoming a bigger part of your everyday digital life, especially because it doesn’t require you to open an app to use it.
Overall, the developer betas this year have been fairly stable, which makes the public beta much easier to recommend this time around. Of course, installing a beta should always be approached with caution; if your device must run perfectly smoothly and never experience errors, then you may want to hold off until the public launch of iOS 27, which is expected in September.
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