Apple put iOS 27 in iPhone users’ hands on a Monday, a few days before the newest phones reached store shelves. The headline feature is a rebuilt Siri that the company calls Siri AI. CNBC reported that it is not open to everyone yet.
The new assistant is in beta, Apple said. Users have to switch it on through the settings app, and some may land on a waitlist before they get access.
What the new Siri does
Siri AI runs on large language models and digs through what is stored on the phone itself: texts, emails and calendar appointments. Ask it for an address, a recipe or a set of instructions and it searches the user’s messages to find them. It also fields general questions and searches the web.
There is now a Siri app, too, which saves earlier queries. Users can answer the assistant’s replies, so an exchange reads more like a conversation than the one-shot commands the old Siri handled.
For now it works in English. French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish are due next month. Apple said the feature will not be available at first in the EU or China because of regulatory reasons.
Small models, a cloud fallback and daily caps
CNBC noted that Apple leans on smaller models of its own making, many of which can run on the chips inside its phones and laptops. That sets it apart from frontier AI from companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. Harder Siri AI requests go to what Apple calls Private Cloud Compute, which runs on Google Cloud infrastructure with Nvidia and Intel chips. Apple is also using Google’s Gemini to build its own models.
The cloud-based features come with limits. Apple said some Siri AI and Apple Intelligence functions that use its servers will be subject to daily usage caps, and that expanded limits will “be available for a fee in the future.” In its release, Apple said the caps “may vary by feature, request complexity, system demand, system policies, and other factors.”
The pitch from Apple’s new chief
John Ternus presented the software at the iPhone launch event the week before. It was his first since he took over from Tim Cook as chief executive on Sept. 1. “It’s personal intelligence that’s actually personal,” he said. He described the iPhone as sitting “at the center of an amazing ecosystem of intelligent features and experiences that work seamlessly across the products you use every day.”
Apple is selling the upcoming iPhone 18 models as the right hardware for this kind of AI, citing their fast chips and the calendars and messages that live on them. Siri AI itself was first shown in June. An AI-powered Siri announced in 2024 was delayed last year.
CNBC’s report did not describe any call from Apple for users to install iOS 27 right away. What it did report is the release, the beta label on Siri AI and the conditions attached to it.
