Siri has been around in one form or another since the end of 2010. It first arrived on iPhones, and later came to other Apple devices. Although Apple tweaked and improved Siri in various ways over the years, it has been showing its age for quite a while. Even the version available in mid-2026, featuring Apple Intelligence and an optional ChatGPT integration, couldn’t hold a candle to modern AI chatbots and digital assistants from other large tech companies. So, the new Siri AI is both welcome and long overdue. However, to appreciate how much better it is, we want to remind you what the old Siri was like.
First, Siri’s capability to use real-world knowledge left a lot to be desired. If you asked Siri about something in the real world—say, the plot of a movie or a recipe for risotto—it would likely as not suggest webpages you could visit to learn about those things. It couldn’t just tell you.
Siri could retrieve information from, and add information to, various apps (such as Calendar, Contacts, and Reminders), and could even make limited inferences (“Show me messages Pat sent me last week”), but it couldn’t tell you anything about what’s on your screen right now, what your camera is looking at, or what time your upcoming flight leaves. That is, it lacked both situational and personal context.
And, the old Siri was largely stuck in a “one request at a time” model, with only a limited capacity for follow-up requests. You could, for example, ask about the weather in Toronto and then say, “What about Vancouver?” and Siri could remember the immediate context—that you want to know about the weather there, too. That was helpful as far as it went, but there was no way to carry on an extended conversation or revisit an earlier one.
Beyond these examples, the old Siri frequently left us with the impression that it could work with only a limited list of requests, but because Apple never revealed what that list was, everything was a guess. A great many requests were met with some variation on “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that.”
It’s not as though the old Siri wasn’t useful! It certainly was. But anyone who had tried out Alexa, Google Assistant, ChatGPT, Claude, or other such providers immediately felt that Siri was way behind the times, which is true. Siri AI brings it, if not into the future, at least into the very recent past.
Extended conversations
Siri can now do much more than answer a simple follow-up question. Like other AI chatbots, it can now carry on extensive conversations, with each response building on and taking into account the context of what was said before. This makes for a much more natural interaction.
Personal context
Siri can now understand what Apple calls “personal context,” which is to say, information that can be pulled from the various apps on your device—data associated with Calendar, Contacts, Mail, Messages, Notes, Photos, Reminders, and so on. That means Siri can incorporate information found in any of those apps into its responses and actions. This can come in handy if you remember seeing something—text or a photo, say—but you don’t remember where or when. Siri can figure that out now.
For instance, you can ask, “Did I talk to Phil Fumble in the past six months?” and Siri can consult your email archive, calendar, and messages to deliver an answer that might have taken you 10 minutes to figure out—if you didn’t give up along the way—while also providing summaries of the topics discussed.
In the future, this should expand to more third-party apps.
Expanded Visual Intelligence
Visual Intelligence lets your device describe what it sees on its screen, in a screenshot, or in the Camera app—and even act on it, like extracting information from a poster or a bill. This means you can ask Siri about anything on your screen, or have it do something with that information. Although part of this capability was previously available on iPhones and iPads, the feature now has expanded powers and is also available on Macs.
Access to web-based data
Although Siri could previously gather information from a limited number of websites (like Wikipedia and IMDb), it can now access the web broadly, incorporating information it finds into its responses and no longer saying things like “I found these articles on the web that might help you.”
In-app and cross-app actions
For years, Siri has been able to change system settings, open apps, and more. In iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27, thanks to an underlying framework called App Intents, Siri can take a much wider set of actions in a larger number of apps. For example, you can ask Siri to send a message in Messages containing the title of the song now playing in Music. Most of Apple’s apps already support actions like these, and third-party apps are getting there.
The Siri app
A new Siri app lets you revisit and continue previous conversations, among other things, and sync your conversations across devices.
Merged Siri and Spotlight UI
Instead of doing one thing to search your device and another to interact with Siri, you can now go to a single place for both.
Other changes
Among numerous other smaller changes, the set of features formerly known as Writing Tools, and now called Write/Edit with Siri, look and behave a bit differently. And, a couple of features—more expressive voices and enhanced dictation—are available only to those with new-enough and powerful-enough devices.
