Be honest. How many times have you asked Siri something simple – “Remind me to call Mom at 6” – and ended up with a Google search for “Mom restaurant near me”? Yeah. Same.
For years, Siri has been the assistant we have but never actually use. So when Apple stood up at WWDC 2026 this week and promised, once again, that Siri is about to become genuinely smart, my first reaction was a tired “We’ll see.” Because they promised exactly this two years ago — and then didn’t deliver. It got so bad that Apple ended up paying a $250 million settlement over iPhone ads that showed off a Siri that didn’t exist yet.
But this time, something’s different. And the difference has a name: Google.
Meet “Siri AI”
Apple’s rebuilt assistant is now called Siri AI, and on paper it’s everything we were promised back in 2024. It’s conversational — you can go back and forth with it like a real chat instead of barking one command at a time. It can see what’s on your screen and understand the context of what you’re doing. It lives in its own dedicated app, syncs your conversations across iPhone, iPad and Mac, and – the big one – it can actually do things across your apps instead of just throwing you a web link and wishing you luck.
A few examples Apple showed off that genuinely made me sit up:
- Point your camera at a plate of food and ask for its nutrition info. Or snap a photo of a restaurant bill and have Siri split it between friends.
- On the Mac, highlight a bunch of documents, ask Siri to compare them, and it builds you a chart — then drafts the follow-up email for you.
- Tell it what you want in plain Hindi-English-whatever, and it strings together multi-step actions on its own.
The plot twist nobody saw coming (okay, some people saw it coming)
Here’s where it gets juicy. The reason Siri suddenly works? It’s powered by Google’s Gemini AI — a custom 1.2-trillion-parameter model Apple is reportedly paying Google around $1 billion a year to use.
Sit with that for a second. Apple — the company that has spent a decade selling us privacy and “we do everything ourselves” as the whole point of buying Apple — just outsourced the brain of its flagship assistant to its biggest rival.
To be fair, Apple’s trying to have it both ways gracefully. It says simple stuff runs right on your device, medium stuff goes through Apple’s own private servers, and only the really heavy thinking gets sent to Google’s cloud — with your data anonymised at each step. You can even swap in other models like ChatGPT or Claude if you want. But the philosophical knot is real, and I don’t think “we anonymised it” fully untangles it.
My honest take? Most of us are going to grumble about it for one week and then use it every single day anyway.
It wasn’t just Siri
The rest of the keynote had some genuinely nice quality-of-life stuff:
- iOS 27 and macOS “Golden Gate” are this year’s big updates. Macs get cleaner toolbars, edge-to-edge sidebars and fresh app icons.
- Remember that Liquid Glass design from last year that everyone (rightly) found hard to read? Apple’s adding an opacity slider so you can dial the transparency all the way down. Thank you.
- Speed. Apple’s promising up to 30% faster app launches, 70% faster photo capture and 80% faster AirDrop. Best part: they tuned things so even older iPhones feel snappier — and iOS 27 supports everything back to the iPhone 11.
- Photos gets AI cleanup, background extend and reframing tools. Parental controls got a serious upgrade too, with stricter, safer defaults for kids’ accounts.
But the real question: will it even work in India?
This is the part nobody outside India talks about, so let me say it plainly. The good news: India is not on the exclusion list — only the EU and China are sitting out the Siri AI launch for now. So it is coming here.
The not-so-good news: if history is any guide, “coming here” and “here right now” are very different things. Last cycle, Apple Intelligence didn’t reach Indian iPhones until March 2025, months after the US got it. So when iOS 27 ships this September alongside the iPhone 18, don’t be shocked if we’re once again watching the demos and waiting our turn. And the big open question — proper Indian-language support — Apple stayed quiet on.
One more thing…
This was also Tim Cook’s last WWDC keynote as CEO. He hands over to hardware chief John Ternus on September 1. There’s something poetic about Cook bowing out by finally shipping the AI Siri he’s been promising for two years — even if he needed Google to get it across the line.
So, should you care?
If you’ve got an iPhone, yes — this is the most useful Siri has ever been, and the performance boosts alone are worth the update. Just keep your expectations grounded: Apple has demoed a brilliant Siri before and not shipped it. The real test isn’t the slick keynote. It’s September, when this thing actually lands on our phones (eventually, in India’s case) and we find out whether it does what the demo promised.
For now? Cautiously optimistic. Which, for Siri, is honestly a historic high.
What do you think — are you upgrading the second iOS 27 drops, or waiting to see if the new Siri actually delivers this time? Tell me in the comments.
