Apple is finally giving Siri the AI overhaul it has been promising. The company has released its next-generation Siri AI, a substantially more capable assistant built around personal context understanding, onscreen awareness, broader knowledge, and the ability to perform actions across apps.

The new Siri AI is powered by the next generation of Apple Intelligence and is designed to understand not just what a user says, but also what they are doing, what information is relevant to them, and what they want to accomplish next. Apple says the result is a more personal and conversational assistant that can find information, answer questions, and carry out tasks throughout the system.

Siri can finally understand your personal context

One of the biggest changes is Siri’s ability to understand personal context across Apple’s apps. Instead of treating every request as an isolated command, Siri AI can search information across messages, emails, photos, and other personal data to find something relevant.

For example, Apple says users can ask Siri to find a restaurant recommendation a friend previously sent them, retrieve a hotel confirmation number from an older email, or locate photos from a recent trip. The assistant can then use that information to answer the user’s request without requiring them to manually search through multiple apps.

Personal context can also extend to compatible third-party apps when developers integrate their content with Apple’s system-level intelligence capabilities. That gives Siri a much broader understanding of the information available across an iPhone, iPad, or Mac.

Siri can see what’s on your screen

Siri AI also gains onscreen awareness, allowing users to ask questions about whatever is currently displayed.

That means Siri can understand the contents of a webpage, image, message, file, or other onscreen material and use that context to answer questions or help the user take action. On an iPhone, for instance, a user could receive a message about a potluck, ask Siri for ideas about what to bring, and then have a recipe added to Notes.

On iPad and Mac, Siri AI is integrated into systemwide interfaces, including Spotlight and context menus. Users can ask about images, files, or text without necessarily leaving the app they are using.

Apple is also expanding Visual Intelligence beyond the iPhone. iPad and Mac users can use it to analyze content on their screens, while Apple Vision Pro users can ask Siri about objects and content within their spatial environment.

Siri can take action across apps

The other major piece of Apple’s Siri overhaul is systemwide app actions.

Rather than simply telling users how to complete a task, Siri AI can increasingly perform the task itself. Apple highlights examples such as drafting an email from scratch, editing and sharing a group of photos, and moving information between different apps.

This is an important shift for Siri. The assistant is no longer limited to answering questions or triggering simple predefined commands. With Apple’s system orchestrator connecting Siri to capabilities such as the Spotlight index and App Toolbox, the company is positioning Siri as a layer that can operate across the apps and services users already rely on.

Developers can also integrate their apps with Apple Intelligence, allowing Siri’s natural-language understanding and contextual capabilities to reach app-specific actions. In practice, that could let users describe what they want to accomplish rather than figuring out which app, menu, or setting contains the necessary control.

Siri gets broader web knowledge and more natural conversations

Siri AI is also designed to handle questions that require information beyond Apple’s own platforms. Apple says the assistant can use broad world knowledge to retrieve up-to-date information from the web and generate an answer.

Users can continue the interaction with follow-up questions, creating a more conversational experience instead of starting a completely new Siri request each time.

Apple is also changing how users access Siri. On iPhone, Siri can still be invoked with “Hey Siri” or the side button, while users can swipe down from the Dynamic Island to start a conversation. On iPad and Mac, Siri AI is integrated into Spotlight, while systemwide context menus provide another way to ask Siri about content.

Apple Vision Pro gets its own spatial approach, with Siri represented as a 3D visualization that users can place in their environment and interact with by looking at it and speaking.

Siri AI is also available across Apple’s ecosystem, including Apple Watch, CarPlay, and AirPods, allowing conversations and assistant capabilities to follow users beyond the iPhone or Mac.

A dedicated Siri app brings conversations together

Apple is also giving Siri something it has never had before: a dedicated app.

The new Siri app provides a place where users can start conversations and return to previous ones. Siri’s conversational history can be privately synchronized across Apple’s devices through iCloud, allowing a conversation started on a Mac to be continued on an iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, or Apple Vision Pro.

That makes Siri feel less like a voice command feature buried inside the operating system and more like a persistent AI assistant that users can return to throughout the day.

Siri’s AI architecture is built around Apple’s privacy model

Apple is also emphasizing privacy as a core part of the new Siri architecture.

Siri AI uses Apple’s next-generation Foundation Models, with models running both on-device and through Private Cloud Compute when additional processing power is required. Apple says that when Private Cloud Compute handles a request, personal data is not stored or made accessible to Apple.

The system also uses on-device technologies such as the Spotlight index and App Toolbox to access relevant information and capabilities while keeping personal data under the user’s control. Apple says outside experts can continue to verify its privacy protections.

That architecture is particularly important for Siri because the assistant’s new capabilities depend heavily on personal context. The more useful Siri becomes at understanding messages, photos, files, schedules, and other information, the more important Apple’s privacy model becomes to the overall experience.

Siri gets a major upgrade to voice and dictation

On devices that support Apple’s most advanced on-device model, Siri AI also brings more expressive voices and improved dictation.

Users can adjust the expressiveness and pace of Siri’s voice, while dictation is designed to produce cleaner text with improved capitalization, punctuation, and formatting.

Apple says its improved speech understanding allows users to speak more naturally while Siri handles the formatting needed to turn that speech into polished text.

Siri becomes an AI writing assistant, too

Writing is another area where Apple is expanding Siri’s role.

Users can ask Siri AI to generate text from scratch or modify existing writing simply by describing what they want changed. The capabilities work virtually anywhere users can type.

Apple says Siri can also take a user’s normal communication style into account when writing messages and emails. If someone typically communicates with their manager using short bullet points, for example, Siri can reflect that style when generating an email.

Siri can also offer suggestions for improving written work and automatically proofread text while users type across the system, including in many third-party apps.

Siri’s camera intelligence gets more powerful

Apple is also combining Siri with Visual Intelligence and the iPhone camera.

A new Siri mode in the Camera app lets users point their iPhone at something, ask questions about what the camera sees, and take actions based on that information. Apple highlights examples including getting nutritional information about food and splitting a bill with friends using Apple Cash.

Visual Intelligence is also expanding to iPad, Mac, and Apple Vision Pro, giving users more ways to ask questions about visual information and take action based on what they see.

Siri AI is now rolling out

Apple has moved Siri AI from its earlier preview into availability as part of the next generation of Apple Intelligence. Apple says the new Siri AI features are available for developer testing across iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, and visionOS 27, with support for watchOS 27 coming in a future beta.

The user-facing Siri AI experience is rolling out in English, with Apple planning to expand support for additional languages. Apple’s current compatibility list includes iPhone 16 models and later, iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max, iPad mini with A17 Pro, iPads and Macs with M1 or later, MacBook Neo with A18 Pro, Apple Vision Pro, and supported Apple Watch models when paired with an Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone.

The bigger story, however, is not simply that Siri can now answer more questions. Apple’s new approach changes what Siri is supposed to be.

For years, Siri was primarily a voice interface for launching apps, setting reminders, answering simple questions, and controlling device functions. Siri AI is being built as a much deeper layer across Apple’s software — one that understands personal context, sees what’s on screen, searches across apps, uses the web for current information, generates and edits content, and can perform actions on a user’s behalf.

If Apple can make all of that work reliably, Siri could finally become the kind of deeply integrated personal AI assistant that the company has been working toward.