Following significant overhauls to their three communications apps in iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and macOS 26—FaceTime, Messages, and Phone—Apple has relaxed a bit with changes in the 27 series of releases. Here’s what you should pay attention to.

To recap: in the 26 series of releases, Apple revamped how favorites appear in FaceTime and Phone, making both apps more consistent with each other, and extended the Phone app to the iPad and Mac.

I’m including cellular and Wi-Fi improvements in this roundup, since they are an obviously necessary part of our ability to use real-time (and semi-asynchronous) communications apps.

FaceTime

After many, many years of FaceTime supporting a single camera view on iPhone, you can now use the front and back cameras simultaneously. The proviso? You need an iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max, or iPhone Air and iOS 27. The other person or people can see your dual-camera feed only if they have iOS 27, iPadOS 27, or macOS 27. (This builds off the dual-capture mode in the Camera app on those models introduced in iOS 26.)

To use the dual-camera mode, in an active FaceTime session (or before someone has joined), tap the Flip Camera button in the inset selfie view. This shows both cameras by default.

Messages

Messages received a tune-up, not an overhaul. Most changes are related to RCS, the industry-supported messaging protocol that Google uses in Android. The changes are:

• Outgoing messages show a send indicator so you can see progress on slower networks or with larger files.
• When you’re sending large photos or videos in a conversation that uses RCS (with Android users), this no longer slows down the typing part of the conversation.
• Reply threading now works with RCS messages.
• RCS messages also support a wider range of tapbacks and reactions.

Apple added support for end-to-end encryption over RCS between their ecosystem and Google’s as a beta release in iOS 26.5.

The only update related to Apple Intelligence so far is that Messages makes a suggestion when it thinks inserting a photo, adding something to Reminders, creating a note, sharing your location, or other actions are contextually appropriate. I haven’t been able to get it to trigger such an alert in testing.

Phone

Apple Intelligence brings Call Context to the Phone app: during a call, Phone offers information from other apps that seems contextually appropriate, like a reservation number or a flight number when you’re calling an airline.

Wi-Fi improvements

Apple tried to tune up a key issue years ago with a feature they called Wi-Fi Assist: when you had a weak signal, there might be a better, higher-speed cellular connection available instead. Your device would then tap into the cell signal while the Wi-Fi signal was poor.

While Wi-Fi Assist helped, it didn’t solve the common problem you are certainly familiar with, when your iPhone won’t unclasp its Wi-Fi grasp as you walk out of one space—like your home or office—and there’s still a tendril of signal left.

Apple rebranded the feature as Connectivity Assist, and if you had Wi-Fi Assist enabled—it was by default—you’ll find the new feature already turned on in Settings > Wi-Fi.

I know how aggravating it is, because my house Wi-Fi barely reaches where we park our cars out front on the street. Whenever I try to pull up Maps for directions, I have to turn off Wi-Fi most days. Connectivity Assist promises to solve that precise issue.

Also in both iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 is an AirDrop speed up. Apple says AirDrop transfers could be as much as five times faster.

Clock

It took this long for Apple to let you set the volume of alarms and timers hitting zero seconds separately from your ringtone volume. Go to Settings > Sounds & Haptics and, under Alarms and Timers, disable Match Ringtone Volume.

Find My

The native Find My app on all platforms has two changes related to duration or availability when you share your location with other people:

• Previously, you could share your location for an hour, until the end of the day, or indefinitely. Now you can set a custom period of time.
• If you’re sharing your location with someone, you can hide your location from your end until the next morning (at 4 a.m.), and they’re not notified. They’re also not told when you resume sharing, or “unhide” your location. They simply see you with a “location unavailable” label.

This is widely seen as another tool for people facing family or intimate-partner abuse to hide their whereabouts without an abuser knowing.

Health and Fitness

The big news in the Health app for iPhone is that, if you have periods, Cycle Tracking supports perimenopause and menopause by notifying you when it identifies patterns consistent with perimenopause.

Other changes worth noting include:

• Health now has a Browse button (instead of a search icon), which better identifies what the action is. The design has changed from a list to a series of small color-coded cards.
• iPhones now support GymKit, which was available only on Apple Watch before this. You can now pair an iPhone directly with supported treadmills, bikes, and other gym equipment.

Home

The Home app now supports 4K resolution video for live streaming and recording from cameras designed for HomeKit Secure Video and with any tier of iCloud+ and that, of course, have 4K output. (Apple still uses the HomeKit name there, even though the concept has been renamed Apple Home.)

If you have more than one camera, Home used to require awkward navigation among them. Now, you can see the previews in the main Home view, but tapping any camera brings up an aggregated view with a unified set of detected events.

With Apple Intelligence, Home reduces the amount of “attention noise” that motion-detecting cameras can generate. Home will combine related activity notifications to prevent a series of motion events from resulting in a constant stream of alerts. It can also stitch together video from multiple cameras, allow natural-language searches for recorded events, and provide summaries you can read without watching the video.

To use Apple Intelligence features, you must subscribe to the 2 TB iCloud+ plan or higher. Your home hub must be a HomePod (2nd generation or later), HomePod mini, or Apple TV updated to the latest release, such as tvOS 27. The Home app and Home accessories must have access to location services.

Podcasts

If you navigate to a podcast’s view of all of its episodes by tapping the podcast and then tapping Episodes, you can now search against the title and show notes of all listed episodes.

This doesn’t search transcripts, which Podcasts generates for some shows. It searches only the per-episode notes published in the podcast feed.

Over the last few years, Apple has released a number of features that parents can use for children that are aimed at reducing two categories of risk: use of apps parents disapprove of, activities parents want to discourage or limit, and spending money online; and exposure to unwanted contact, images, and videos, as well as preventing children from being able to make unfettered connections or send material to arbitrary people.

There have been bumps along the way. When Apple first introduced their more advanced child-safety features, they proposed invading people’s phones to look for potentially illegal material in a way that would treat a billion customers as if they might be criminals. They revised the approach, not without even more criticism.

On the parental-restriction front, Screen Time was Apple’s most direct foray into enabling guardians to shape children’s digital access. But Screen Time is janky—there’s no better word. It is sometimes hard to configure, it often fails, and kids can work around it even when they aren’t intending to.

With iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 (and extending to other platforms), Apple tries to offer substantive fixes and improvements to both aspects of child safety and adult supervision.

My children are, alas, both older than 18, and I’m unable to test these features directly.

Blur gore and violence

Apple has gingerly expanded features in this category. In this set of releases, Apple has pushed forward just a single change. The Communication Safety feature, which is enabled by default for children 13–17, already blurs any image or video that appears to contain nudity, whether the child is receiving it or attempting to send it, across a range of Apple’s communications apps, including Messages, AirDrop, and FaceTime video messages. The blurred image comes with a warning, offering guidance on seeking help. (For children under 13, they’re also prompted to start a conversation with a parent or guardian.)

In the 27 series of releases, images and video that a screening algorithm determines contain gore or violence also trigger the blur filter and warning.

Siri spent years seeming like it didn’t quite fit the level of quality Apple aspires to. Worse, the company announced capabilities it wasn’t able to release, and features that have disappointed. You can tell this wasn’t just users carping: more than one head of the Siri effort has left the company altogether.

Apple Intelligence was more of a success, if limited. The company, making use of mostly on-device computation, focused their use of Apple Intelligence on specific tasks within apps or systemwide. I think many of these attempts were boring or unnecessary: generating custom emojis, Image Playground for slightly icky picture generation, and the global Writing Tools, which were worse than many previous generations of non-AI-based assistants.

The reboot has come, however. With Siri AI and Apple Intelligence in iOS 27 and iPadOS 27, Apple is resetting our expectations for Siri and adding Apple Intelligence features in many more apps. Those features are a mix of machine learning and large language models (LLMs), and some tie into off-device, data-center-based LLM assistance.

Learning by rote versus guessing the next word

Machine learning typically refers to training an algorithm with a massive amount of data so that it can loosely pattern-match a result. In Photos, the loose searching you can do to find matches for people, places, buildings, and things relies on this. Likewise, voice transcription and Live Text are largely machine-learning-based.

LLMs, by contrast, use huge bodies of text and images to produce essentially sophisticated autocompletion. Given a set of words, what is the constellation of the next most likely one? Randomly selecting among those provides something that sounds like human writing. However, they are actually providing a statistical guess. Image generation is more complicated, but it relies on extracting features and then inserting them seamlessly, with the same degree of random guessing about which one to add.

Let Siri AI answer your questions

While Apple has rebranded Siri as “Siri AI” on supported devices and in their marketing, you won’t see that name on your devices. It’s still called Siri. But everything is affected by the availability of Apple Intelligence. Whenever you invoke Siri on an Apple Intelligence-supported device, you’re invoking Siri AI.

Instead of the glow around all four edges of your device in iOS 26/iPadOS 26, Siri in iOS 27/iPadOS 27 appears as an orb at the top of the screen. The design cleverly hides the non-screen areas in Dynamic Island on the many iPhone models with that carveout.

You can bring up Siri (by default), as in previous releases, by saying “Siri” or “Hey Siri,” or by pressing and holding the side button. However, the change introduced in iOS 26 that let you double-tap the bottom of the screen is gone. Instead, you can swipe down on a Home screen to reveal the new combination of Spotlight and Siri: a field labeled Search or Ask. You can type into that field, or tap the Dictation icon and talk to Siri that way.

Siri now provides much more accurate and detailed answers than before, even reaching into other apps to provide more information. Ask it a question, and it parses the results instead of trying to squeeze them into a format it understands.

Here are the most significant things Siri AI can do that its predecessor Siri could not:

• Use your data to produce better results or find things. One of the biggest ongoing complaints about Siri is that for software that ostensibly had access to our email, messages, contacts, calendar entries, photos, and other private data while running entirely on our devices, it sure didn’t know much about us. With Siri AI, you can ask, “Who did I have lunch with in 2013 in New Haven?” and it may be able to answer.
• Answer questions about what’s on screen. You could be looking at a webpage, reading a Wikipedia entry, having a conversation in Messages, or writing an email, and can ask Siri for more information about or to explain something that’s visible.
• Engage in a back-and-forth conversation. Siri has become something more like a chatbot, though it’s not quite as open-ended as the ones from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and others. However, it retains context and remembers aspects of conversations to provide better insight in the future.
• Create a plan. You might ask Siri to help you figure out the best sights to see in New York. Unlike chatbots that rely solely on synthesizing vast data stores, Siri can use your information, Apple’s human-made travel guides, map data, and other information to produce something that could be much more useful.
• Use a Siri app. You can revisit Siri conversations using the Siri app, the first time Apple has offered that kind of interaction with Siri.

Isn’t this invasive?

Didn’t we think one of the best things about Siri, and Apple’s overall approach to data privacy, is that everything stayed on our devices and within our control? Or, if it were synced in the cloud, we had two tiers we could choose from to protect it, including end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for nearly everything?

Yes, and that remains the case. Siri AI performs as much processing as possible on your device. When it needs to tap into more or different AI models, it uses what Apple calls Private Cloud Compute, which includes servers under Apple’s control and those that are part of Google Cloud. Apple says our “personal data is not stored nor made accessible to Apple or anyone else.” There are limits to that promise worth knowing.

Where Siri AI is available

• European Union: Siri AI will first appear in macOS and Apple Vision Pro. It’s unclear when they will roll out to iPhone and iPad.
• China: Siri AI and new features in Apple Intelligence were originally slated to be delayed at launch in China (PRC), with Apple saying regulators need to review changes. However, news reports in mid-August 2026 indicated Apple had trained an AI model with a Chinese partner that would allow it to offer Apple Intelligence features in China at launch.

The camera on your iPhone or iPad can use Visual Intelligence to describe objects in its view. This option isn’t available on a Mac, and works differently on an Apple Vision Pro.

Apple doesn’t label Visual Intelligence as a distinct element from Siri in iOS 27 and iPadOS 27. Rather, when you use Siri with the camera, you’re using Visual Intelligence, no matter which method you use to bring it up.

Invoke Visual Intelligence

• Camera Control: Click and hold the Camera Control button on iPhones with that hardware button.
• Action button: Customize the Action button (Settings > Action Button) to Visual Intelligence.
• Lock Screen: Customize the Lock Screen to add a Visual Intelligence button in one of the slots at the bottom. (On the Lock Screen, touch and hold on the screen, tap Customize, then remove an existing button or add Visual Intelligence into an empty space.)
• Control Center: You can use an existing Visual Intelligence button. Swipe down from the upper-right corner, and tap Visual Intelligence.

Use Siri AI mode

First, use any method to invoke Visual Intelligence: Camera Control, the Action button, Control Center, or a Lock Screen button. For instance, swipe down from the upper-right corner to tap the Visual Intelligence button in Control Center.

Starting in iOS 27 and iPadOS 27, you can also open the Camera app and slide the mode selector, set by default to Photo, to Siri. Whichever method you choose, the Camera app opens to the Siri mode. Visual Intelligence can offer suggestions for what it can do even before you tap the shutter button, which are covered below. But let’s start with the most obvious action: tapping the Shutter button, which is replaced with a Siri icon.

Starting in iOS 27 and iPadOS 27, you will see the new Siri icon everywhere the Apple Intelligence icon previously appeared. This includes the Visual Intelligence button in Control Center—the Siri icon set within four corner elements representing camera focus. Yes, even though it opens to Siri in Camera, it’s called Visual Intelligence.

When you tap the Siri shutter, your device performs what is probably a gratuitous animation of scanning the image. It’s fun to look at, and covers the period of time that analysis is actually happening, distracting you from thinking about that. So—OK? Then it provides information, which can come in two forms:

• Identify the primary object on screen. A Kennedy half dollar is identified, and the information correctly shows its date, 1998, and provides specific details about that issue.
• Present a series of potential actions based on its analysis. For instance, we put a business card and a membership card in its field of vision, tapped the shutter, and it suggested adding a pass to Wallet, adding a Contact, and provided various bits of the address information.
• Do both! Pointing at a couple of objects, Visual Intelligence provided a summary of information about both. Among the button options are Add Pass to Wallet, make a call, send an email, and map. Tapping Add Pass to Wallet brings up the new pass creator.

What follows next are the kinds of tasks Apple has called out or, we’ve found in testing, that Siri presents a button based on.

Take actions based on what camera sees

When you point your camera at something in Siri mode that Visual Intelligence instantly recognizes as being in a certain category, the Camera app displays a yellow button, such as Split Bill with Apple Cash. This is quite similar to how Camera in Photo mode recognizes a QR code and presents an option, such as opening a URL or authenticating via passkey. It’s just much, much more extensive with Visual Intelligence.

If it doesn’t automatically recognize an object, tap the Siri shutter button, and the analysis described above it performed. That often triggers the appropriate button to appear when live analysis fails.

The bill is the richest of these, and has its own walkthrough.

Learn about nutrition

Point Siri at food, and it tells you something about its nutritional value. In our testing, we’ve found that Look Up Nutrition is quite broad, offering insights you might naturally assume when looking at a product without involving any kind of artificial intelligence. For instance, it doesn’t provide the U.S. Nutrition Facts (already printed on packaged products), nor does it give detailed information of any kind. We expect Apple wants to do more here, given that there’s so much room to provide people with information.

Add a card to Wallet

Point at a membership or other kind of card that Wallet understands, and Siri offers to add it to Wallet. That is covered in how to turn any card into a Wallet pass.

Parse a business card

Siri recognizes business cards and can structure data extracted from them to insert into Contacts.

Import multiple calendar events

There is a special kind of drudgery in having to enter information manually that you know very well a computer should be able to process for you. For instance, imagine being presented with a school calendar brought home by a child on a piece of paper that is not, somehow, also a shared Calendar or downloadable CalDAV file. (We know this is inconceivable in the modern era, but bear with us.) Visual Intelligence solves this for you, starting in iOS 27 and iPadOS 27.

Point Siri at a list of events, and it translates them into calendar entries. Your mileage may vary on exactly what’s extracted, but Visual Intelligence appears to pull out salient date, time, and location information. It makes an assumption that all events are one hour long unless a time range appears.