The first public beta for iOS 27 it’s now available for downloadwhich means if you have a compatible iPhone, you can try the new Siri AI ahead of its official launch this fall.
This public beta is equivalent to the third developer beta of the new iPhone software. While there are still several beta versions left for developers this summer, the first versions of software have been stable enough to represent what can be expected in the final version.
I’ve been testing these developer versions of iOS 27 on a iphone air since the first one was released in WWDC 2026 and using Siri AI daily for just over a month. Sorry to sound hyperbolic, but Apple is fucking cooked.
It took me maybe two weeks to learn what Siri AI could and couldn’t do, but once I figured it out, I now can’t imagine using my phone without the smarter assistant. Every time I accidentally pick up my iPhone 16 Prothat is still going iOS 26 And loaded with “classic Siri,” I feel like I’ve been taken back to the stone age.
But first, a brief history lesson for those who haven’t followed the Siri drama. At WWDC 2024, Apple announced a massive revamp of its voice assistant, complete with “personal context,” a way for Siri to display information from all your apps. For example, instead of manually searching your inbox for flight information, you can simply ask Siri to search it for you. Do you want to know what your “lunch plans” are with your mom? Siri would find that information in the chat between you and your mom. Apple also demonstrated how Siri can understand what’s happening on your iPhone screen, providing information about what it “sees.”
All of these new Siri features were supposed to launch under “Apple Intelligence,” Apple’s set of AI features for its devices, including iPads and Macs. When it came time to launch that fall, other Apple Intelligence features, such as writing tools and notification summaries, were implemented, but the new Siri was not.
2025 has come and gone without the new voice assistant. In WWDC 2025Apple executives admitted that the new Siri was delayed because it did not meet Apple’s expectations. “It didn’t converge to the quality we needed,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering. told the Wall Street Journal. Instead of shipping a half-baked Siri, he said Apple decided to redesign it. That ultimately ended with Apple partnering with Google to use its Gemini Models Basically, to give Siri a much-needed brain transplant.
Fast forward to this year’s WWDC in June, where Apple spent a good portion of its 1.5-hour keynote showing that the new Siri, now called Siri AI, actually works and is no longer vaporware.
Siri AI needed to stick the landing, and it mostly does, if my first month with beta versions is any indication.
After indexing your iPhone (this may take a few days depending on how much data you have), Siri AI will be ready to delve into your Apple apps and, well, assist you. The first few days (and even weeks) were trial and error. I asked Siri AI all kinds of questions and was surprised (and not surprised) by what it could do.
Without ever telling Siri AI who my girlfriend was, she was able, by holding down the side button on my iPhone, to tell me what kind of foods she liked based on entries in my Notes app and the messages she had sent me when we started dating. Siri AI also reminded me that she doesn’t like salads. (Just like me!) Answers emerged from the Dynamic Island on my iPhone, and from there I could continue the conversation by voice or type in the “Ask Siri” bar. There’s also a + button to take a photo, include an image from the Photos app, or attach a file.
Interacting with Siri AI is very similar to a chatbot app like ChatGPT or Perplexity, meaning it’s very easy to understand and use. If you are familiar with those types of AI chatbot applications, you will quickly learn Siri AI.
I asked Siri AI to find me the details of my next flight to London to Samsung unpacked next week. My flight details appeared correctly with departure and arrival times. Could I have opened my mail app and searched for it myself? Yes, but getting into my inbox is stressful. I hate going through emails, especially long ones, to find something. In situations like this, Siri AI saves me a lot of time.
When you ask Siri AI to do something and it does it, it feels like magic. I’m so excited it saved me a lot of taps. But when it fails to do something, reality sets in and you realize that Siri AI is still a work in progress. apple lists a bunch of “actions” in apps that Siri can perform, like “rotate a photo to the left.” I asked Siri to do this for me, but instead of rotating the image, it opened the crop tool and then told me I could rotate it myself. Not exactly the “just do it” attitude I was looking for.
The real magic happens when you request multi-step actions: chain a few tasks together. A real-life example: Find things my dad likes and then compose an email to my mom suggesting we consider buying them for Father’s Day. With a voice command, Siri checked my iPhone, identified that I had considered “AirPods 4” as a gift, and composed an email. Siri AI missed the part about sending the email to my mom, but it did most of the work, which I find impressive.
Mostly, I found myself using Siri AI to search for things just like I do with ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity. When I needed a recipe for garlic shrimp, he found me one of Very good taste cuisine. I didn’t have to go to the website and deal with annoying ads. When I wanted to know more about Jalen Brunson and how he led the New York Knicks to their first NBA championship in 53 years, I simply asked Siri AI and it gave me a rundown with a brief chart of key statistics, pulled from Wikipedia. When I needed help identifying an actor in a Malcolm in the middle video clip I was watching on my MacBook, I turned on the Camera app, tapped the new Siri mode, took a photo, and Siri AI correctly told me her name was Tania Raymonde using “Visual Intelligence.” You could then continue the conversation with follow-up questions, such as asking about their recent acting roles.
One thing you should keep in mind is that Siri AI’s usefulness may be limited when it shouldn’t be. You’d think that telling Siri AI to “show how much storage I have left on my iPhone” would open the respective screen within the Settings app and simply show me the remaining gigabytes. Unfortunately, Siri AI was only able to point me to the Settings app and then tell me which menus to tap.
All the “conversations” you have with Siri AI are saved in the new Siri app. It is useful to remember past chats. By default, the app automatically deletes conversations after 30 days, but you can change that to a year or keep them forever. Worth noting: Deleting conversations doesn’t necessarily make Siri AI “dumber,” but if you re-request something you previously requested, it could take longer since your data needs to be rescanned to get that information.
Siri AI is also not completely bug-free. For example, every time I asked “show me pictures with me and my sisters,” it showed “Here are the pictures with Jenny and Angela” followed by a black space where the pictures should have been. I noticed several glitches and misunderstandings during the early developer betas, but that’s to be expected since this is early release software.
It’s also worth noting that Siri AI can also make mistakes. While it’s less likely to hallucinate information compared to other LLM-based chatbots when pulling information from your Apple apps like Mail, Messages, and Notes, I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that Siri AI will tell me something one day, and I’ll blindly trust it only to end up screwed somehow. I have witnessed some of Siri AI’s incorrect responses. I sometimes thought my girlfriend was my sister when I asked her for group photos, and some of the “data” taken from the web was from websites I wouldn’t consider reputable.
The base of Siri AI is here. It’s remarkable that Apple was able to correct its huge mistake and somehow not miss a beat in the AI race. Of course, that’s the advantage Apple has in controlling the entire stack, both hardware and software. Its powerful compatible devices can perform many AI tasks locally and in private. In the case of Siri AI, anything that leverages personal context is on the device and is never sent to the cloud. Things that require “global knowledge” or information from the web do, but also privately, thanks to Apple’s Private Cloud Compute, which Apple says never shares your personal data with any company.
Siri AI is currently only available in English and in the US. Apple has not announced plans to bring Siri AI to Europe due to Digital Markets Act restrictions. The launch of Siri AI in China is also up in the air due to regulations.
A month with Siri AI and every day I find myself talking to it more and more. I no longer need to unlock my iPhone, launch an AI app, and then make a voice or text message. The intelligence and automation (light as they still are right now) that Siri AI has now is what Apple promised when the voice assistant launched on the iPhone 4S in 2011. There will probably never be a big moment when Siri AI changes everything, but if Apple can keep building on it, this time for real, we’ll all be touching our glass slabs a lot less and talking to Siri AI to do more and more.
