Siri AI is finally good, and it only took Apple a decade

Apple spent two years promising a smarter Siri and one year quietly failing to ship it. So it’s genuinely funny to say this: the new Siri AI, out now in the iOS 27 public beta, is good. Properly good.

A decade late and built with someone else’s brain

The backstory matters here, if only because of how badly Apple fumbled it. The “personal context” Siri, the one that could dig through your Mail and Messages instead of you doing it manually, was promised at WWDC 2024 and then quietly no-showed that autumn. By WWDC 2025, Apple admitted the thing simply didn’t work well enough to ship, and rebuilt it from the ground up with Google’s Gemini models doing the heavy lifting. That’s an unusual move for a company that guards its own AI stack jealously, and it says a lot about how badly the original attempt missed.

What Siri AI actually gets right

What you get now is closer to a genuinely useful research assistant living in your phone than the old “set a timer” Siri. Ask it who someone in your life is and what they like, and it’ll pull that from years of Notes entries and old texts without ever being told directly, and it stays entirely on-device when the answer comes from your own data. Ask for flight details buried in an email, and it just finds them, no scrolling required.

Ask it to chain a few steps together, like finding a gift idea from your notes and drafting an email about it, and it mostly pulls it off, even if it occasionally forgets who the email was meant to go to.

Where Siri AI still trips up

It’s not flawless. Ask it to rotate a photo, and it’ll open the crop tool and tell you to do it yourself, which rather defeats the point. Some of its web answers lean on sources I wouldn’t trust with my dinner order, let alone facts. And it’s currently English-only, US-only, with no timeline for Europe thanks to the Digital Markets Act.

None of that erases the bigger point. This is the assistant Apple promised when Siri launched on the iPhone 4S in 2011, arriving fourteen years late and built with someone else’s brain. Better late than vapourware, I suppose.

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