Siri AI lands with iOS 27, iPhone 15 Pro or later only

Siri debuted on the iPhone in 2011, five years before Google Assistant and 11 years before ChatGPT opened to the public. Despite that head start, Apple's voice AI was comprehensively overtaken in recent years and made to look primitive next to the generative AI rivals it now faces. iOS 27 is Apple's answer, and the changes go beyond a new name.

The new capabilities share a common thread: keeping work on the device. Siri AI indexes texts, emails, calendars, photos, and videos locally, with nothing sent back to Apple, and it can act on what is on screen without a screenshot. Where the old Siri handed text generation to an integrated ChatGPT plug-in, Siri AI does the writing itself, and it gains its own app for chat history and syncing across Apple devices—something it had been missing next to Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT. Apple also promises "broad world knowledge" for standalone questions.

The catch is hardware. The on-board silicon requirement limits the main features to iPhone 15 Pro or later, and the tone, speed, and expressivity controls to the latest devices. How much of Siri AI's promised depth—especially deeper hooks into third-party, non-Apple apps—actually arrives may depend on how quickly Apple extends those integrations, and on how many users are on hardware new enough to run them.