iOS 27 public beta brings AI-powered Siri to all

Apple has released the iOS 27 public beta, giving everyday users their first broad access to the company's biggest Siri overhaul ever. The AI-powered assistant, announced at WWDC in June, transforms the aging voice assistant into a capable chatbot that can pull data from a user's device—emails, photos, messages—and respond to what's on the screen. It also grounds answers in world knowledge, similar to ChatGPT or Gemini. Siri is now deeper integrated across the OS: accessible via voice, side button, Dynamic Island, and even Spotlight search. It even has its own standalone app, though its system-wide integration may make that redundant. The beta spans iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, CarPlay, AirPods, Apple TV, and Vision Pro, potentially reaching a fraction of Apple's 2.5 billion active devices.

Under the hood, Siri AI relies on Apple Intelligence, specifically Apple's new Foundation Models built in collaboration with Google's Gemini. These are not rebranded Gemini; they were designed for Apple Silicon using proprietary data and distilled from Gemini—a process that creates highly efficient, on-device models. Apple's Private Cloud Compute ensures user data is never stored or accessible to Apple. In developer betas, Siri handled tasks like finding specific photos, summarizing texts, adding appointments from texts, and answering nutrition questions from camera view, though it sometimes threw errors (e.g., searching contacts for a news topic). The developer betas have been fairly stable, making the public beta recommendable with caution. The full public launch is expected in September.