The short-lived Apple Intelligence & Siri setting pane is no more. In its place is a Siri pane, complete with a new icon. (For more about Siri on the Mac.)
In order for the new version of the pane, with its new icon, to appear, the Language setting on the pane must currently be set to English (United States). Set it to anything else—even English (Canada)—and you get the old icon with the Tahoe-era Siri features. Language support should expand in the future.
The most prominent change is that unlike the old pane, the new one no longer has either an Apple Intelligence switch or a Siri switch at the top. That is, you can no longer disable Apple Intelligence completely, and if you want to disable Siri (along with portions of Apple Intelligence), you must scroll to the bottom of the pane, click the red Turn Off Siri button, read a long description of all the things that will stop working if you do, and then click Turn Off Siri.
Interesting to note, however, is that even if you turn off Siri, “Visual Intelligence will continue to work but with more limited capabilities,” though Apple doesn’t spell out what those limitations are, and other Apple Intelligence features such as Writing Tools, Image Playground, and Shortcuts continue to work. All this is Apple’s heavy-handed way of pushing these new features, even if you actively dislike them and don’t ever want to use them.
Assuming you’re using English as your language—and that’s the only language supported in the initial release of macOS 27 Golden Gate—the pane adds three settings regarding the Siri App:
- Opens To: Select what appears when you open the app: either Recent Conversations or A New Conversation.
- Keep Conversations: Select 30 Days, 1 Year, or Forever. Note that there’s no longer a Delete Siri & Dictation History button, though you can manually delete any or all of the history items in the Siri app.
- Preview: Select None or 1–5 lines.
In addition, the Requests entry replaces the previous “Listen for” pop-up menu (where you can select “Siri” or “Hey Siri,” “Hey Siri,” or Off), and the Responses item gives you only two options: Spoken Response or Silent Response. (Tahoe had an Automatic option, along with Prefer Silent Responses and Prefer Spoken Responses.) Instead of clicking Siri Suggestions & Privacy to specify each app’s Siri settings, you now click App Access. And there are some additional ChatGPT options, for anyone who connects Siri to ChatGPT.
The Automatic Visual Look Up switch also lives here; what it does is covered in Siri AI on the Mac.
Finally, Tahoe let you set the keyboard shortcut used to invoke Siri, but macOS 27 does not. You can invoke Siri with ⌘-Space, the Spotlight shortcut, or with a second dedicated shortcut; holding that second shortcut speaks to Siri even if Requests is turned off. Although you can still change the Spotlight keyboard shortcut (in System Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Spotlight), there’s no evident way to change the dedicated Siri shortcut to anything else.
Control Siri conversations syncing among your devices in System Settings > Your Name > iCloud: click See All, then click Siri. You can disable Sync this Mac (enabled by default). The Keep Conversations setting is synced with the main Siri retention setting: change it here, and it’s changed globally, not just for iCloud.
