Siri made its debut on the iPhone in 2011, five years ahead of Google Assistant and 11 years before ChatGPT would open up to the public. Despite the head start, Apple’s voice AI has been comprehensively overtaken in recent years, and made to look rather primitive compared to the many generative AI rivals it’s now up against.
With the launch of iOS 27, Apple and Siri are fighting back. There’s a new name—Siri AI—and a host of new capabilities that are coming to your iPhone.
These are the new features that you’ll be able to make use of once iOS 27 appears on your handset, if you’re running the iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone 15 Pro Max or later (including, of course, the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone Duo). Only these latest phones have the necessary on-board silicon to meet the higher AI processing demands.
Get More Personal Context
You’ll notice when Siri AI arrives that it spends some time indexing everything on your iPhone. That’s so it can dig deep into your texts, emails, calendars, and whatever else you have stored on your phone (everything is kept on-device though—nothing gets sent back to Apple).
It means you can ask natural questions about text conversations, email interactions, and appointments—”What day is my work appraisal happening?” for example, or “Where did I say I’d meet Mom?”—and get informed, personalized answers back, based on what’s already stored in your apps.
This works for photos and videos as well. Open up the Photos app and you’re able to ask Siri AI to show you all the pictures of your pet, or the images you took on your last vacation, or all the photos of trees you’ve collected, via simple, conversational prompts.
Ask About Anything on the Screen
Siri AI knows what you’re looking at while you’re using your iPhone—perhaps even better than you do. Whereas before you would’ve had to take a screenshot and give it to Siri to look at, now you can just ask.
So if you’re on the web in Safari, you can say “Hey Siri” and then get it to summarize the text onscreen or identify a landmark in an image in an online article. You can ask what certain options mean in Settings, or look up more details about a game you’re thinking about downloading from the App Store.
The same sort of visual processing is available through the iOS Camera app too: Just switch to Siri mode using the selector by the shutter button, and ask Siri AI about anything that’s in view (nutritional information about an item on a menu, for instance).
Write and Edit Text Anywhere
The old Siri could generate text for you, but it offloaded the job to an integrated ChatGPT plug-in. With Siri AI, no third-party help is needed, and you can use it for things like text messages and emails.
Just call up Siri AI by saying “Hey Siri” or tapping on the Write with Siri link, then tell it what you want to say or describe the edits you’d like it to make. You can instruct it to make your messages sound more or less formal, to expand or shorten sections of text, or to turn quick notes into full paragraphs and sentences.
You retain final approval over what’s written, and can continue to make manual or AI-generated edits as you go. Siri AI lets you review all the changes and jump backwards and forwards through your different revisions.
Do More Inside Your Apps
Not only can Siri AI access more information pulled from your apps, it can now take more actions inside these apps. You’re able to create calendar events or switch playlists just by talking or typing to the digital assistant.
Some of this was already possible with the earlier incarnation of Siri, but now you can go deeper and do more inside your apps, and you should be able to use a wider range of natural language prompts to get stuff done—just as if you were talking to a real human assistant you’d handed your phone over to.
You might see some suggestions for actions pop up as well—so if someone texts you a date and time, you’ll see Siri inviting you to create a calendar event. Over time, deeper hooks into third-party, non-Apple apps should show up too.
Get at All Your Chats With the Siri App
For the first time, Apple’s digital AI assistant has its own app. Launch it from the home screen to access your Siri AI conversation history and sync your queries and requests across different Apple devices.
Compared to the likes of Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT, this is something Siri AI has been sorely missing, and it gives you another way of launching chats with the assistant: Open up the dedicated app rather than invoking it with a voice command.
Also, look out for what Apple calls “broad world knowledge” in the new Siri AI. Roughly translated, stand-alone queries about the history of Rome or how to fix a leaky faucet should bring up more informed, complete responses in the app.
Customize Siri’s Pace and Expressivity
This final tip needs even more computing resources, so it’s only for the most powerful devices—the 2026 iPhones, as well as the iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max, and iPhone Air—as far as iPhones go.
The actual feature is being able to adjust the tone, speed, and what Apple calls the “expressivity” of Siri AI’s spoken responses to you. In other words, you can tweak the personality of the assistant to some extent, as well as switch between voices.
To find these new options, open up Settings on your iPhone and tap Siri. You can customize Siri AI in other ways from this same screen, including changing the AI’s default voice and choosing how long to keep chats stored in your history.
