For the first time in Siri history, you can ask Siri questions or ask it to do something and almost always get a satisfactory outcome. Revolutionary! Even better, Siri retains context: you can have an ongoing conversation in the Siri app, and the vastly upgraded chatbot feature now doesn’t lose the thread.
Many people have mixed feelings about chatbots, particularly when they veer from utility into social, emotional, and personal interactions, but Siri is designed to stay largely on the utility target. Siri is designed for a purpose, and works well within those constraints. More broadly, it has the same limitations, advantages, and failings of other chatbots.
Carry on conversations
The power of Siri AI extends beyond asking it questions, of course. Engaging in conversations lets you drill down, rephrase your question, or ask follow-ups. This can be done after activating Siri, where you are just continuing on. This is already different than before iOS 27, when Siri’s ability to keep up its side of the conversation dropped off immediately or quickly.
Or you can open the Siri app. You can also click or tap answers from Siri in its pop-up or sheet-based view, and your device will open the Siri app.
However you navigate to activate Siri, you can immediately type or speak something after its response to whatever your first question or requested action was.
This can be useful if Siri’s first response or action wasn’t sufficient, or if it provided information or succeeded and you want to follow up by using context. You don’t have to define your scenario once again, which Siri often required before Siri AI.
For instance, we followed this line of questioning: “I watched a movie with Orson Welles in it last night. I think it took place in Austria.” Siri responds, “The movie you are thinking of is likely The Third Man. This 1949 film noir stars Orson Welles as Harry Lime and is famously set in post-World War II Vienna, Austria.”
You can then continue down that line of questions. We then asked why the zither was so prominent. It provided a detailed response (and an accurate one). Thinking of zithers, we wondered whether there was any zither music in the library. He hit a limit here: Siri only knows about locally stored music from its metadata, as far as we can tell, or at least without asking further questions. So it found, appropriately, “The Third Man” by Anton Karas in Apple Music, and offered to play it.
