Summary

  • Siri AI launches on iOS 27 but runs on Google Gemini, meaning Apple relies on a rival for core AI.
  • New Siri can see screens, handle context, and uses more natural voices — features Apple delayed for years.
  • Siri now sends complex queries to Google's cloud, undermining Apple's on-device privacy promise.

At its annual WWDC 2026 event, Apple finally showed off Siri AI, a major update to Apple Intelligence designed to make its often-criticised voice assistant smarter in today’s AI-driven world. Siri AI now has its own app, can understand what’s on your screen, uses more natural voices, and can do things like grab an address from a message to help you find a flight time.

But Apple isn’t creating the future with Siri AI; instead, it’s borrowing it from one of its biggest rivals: Google. The new Siri, which is the main feature of iOS 27 and the next step for the iPhone, runs on Google Gemini, Google’s advanced language model. With Gemini, Siri can handle more complex tasks, have more natural conversations, and provide smarter, context-aware help, all thanks to Google’s technology working in the background. This all sounds great, but it’s leaving one question on fans' lips…

Apple's Siri assistant on an iPhone 16 Pro
Apple needs Google to save Siri—and I’m honestly embarrassed for them

When your rival has to bail out your assistant.

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Is Apple struggling to innovate on its own?

For over a decade, Apple has been built on absolute control. You get locked up in their ecosystem, happily buying MacBooks, AirPods, and Apple Watches because they all seamlessly talk to each other under one roof.

But Apple has been slow to adopt AI. When OpenAI launched ChatGPT in late 2022, it sparked a gold rush. While competitors like Microsoft, Anthropic, and Google released their own advanced language models, Siri couldn’t perform simple tasks such as tracking multistep requests or understanding simple context. Now, Siri relies on Google’s technology.

To introduce this new AI interface, Apple changed basic iOS navigation. Now, swiping down brings up a large "Search or Ask" text box. This change disrupts the iPhone’s usual navigation, making it feel like Apple copied ChatGPT’s text interface and is admitting that voice control still isn’t reliable. Apple introduced the Dynamic Island as the future of quick, contextual information. The main features Apple highlighted—like Siri seeing your screen or pulling an address from a message—are the same ones they promised in 2024. It took Apple two years of delays to match what Google Pixel phones have already been doing for a year now, powered by Google Gemini.

This goes against Apple’s usual privacy promises, which say that your personal data is processed safely on your device. By sending complex Siri AI questions to Google’s cloud servers, Apple no longer keeps your data local, since it needs outside help to offer competitive AI features. According to Apple's SVP of engineering, Craig Federighi, Siri AI in beta is now available to developers, with a release date of "this fall" for users. Users in the European Union and China are getting it at some undefined point.