Apple’s drastic overhaul of Siri, announced Monday at WWDC 2026, attempts to make the smartphone voice assistant more helpful, attuned to iPhone users’ personal data, and action-oriented. A major aspect of this Siri revamp is a partnership with Google Gemini to help power the AI tool’s underlying model as part of Apple Intelligence.
After extended delays, Apple is moving forward with a dynamic repositioning of Siri that changes how the voice assistant appears on iPhones and gives people a new way to access it: a stand-alone Siri app.
The all-new dedicated Siri app.Courtesy of Apple
This revamp is expected to roll out to consumers later this year. Soon, users will also be able to have chatbot-style interactions with Siri and access past conversations, similar to the user experience on ChatGPT. Siri will also be able to use personal information stored on your phone—including what’s currently on your screen—when answering questions.
Before this announcement, Siri had stayed relatively static while the generative AI revolution raged around it. Other voice assistants like Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT were able to eclipse Apple’s efforts in a short time.
“Over the last few years, with the growth of large language models, some of these assistants have gotten tremendously capable—while Siri has remained relatively programmatic and limited in what it can do,” says Avi Greengart, a lead analyst and president of Techsponential, a market advisory firm.
This new Siri can simply do more. If you want help composing an email, the revamped Siri can pull in contextual information from your Apple devices, like details tucked away in your Notes app, to generate a response for you. It can even compose draft texts to send to your group chats. Siri is following a similar pitch set forth by other hot assistants in 2026: Give the AI tool more personal info so it can be a better helper.
In 2011, when Apple decided to integrate Siri into the iPhone 4s, it was a breakthrough moment for smartphone voice assistants. This nascent version of Siri could check the weather, make appointments, and set timers. The Zooey Deschanel launch video where she lounges around in pajamas and asks Siri whether it's raining outside is permanently etched into my brain. Rather than some app you needed to download, the voice assistant was now built right into the device.
As the years progressed, other companies' voice assistants started to catch up with Apple’s Siri, leading to hand-wringing articles, in outlets like this one, about whether the iPhone maker was losing its edge.
This culminated on the WWDC stage in 2024 when Apple announced a bevy of new Siri features that were slated to arrive for iPhone owners. The company positioned these fresh, highly personalized updates as a core reason for buying a newer smartphone. When these AI features failed to materialize fully in a timely manner, consumers struck Apple with a false-advertising lawsuit and settled for a $250 million payout.
Despite the company’s early success with Siri, is Apple too late here to succeed alongside the next generation of AI assistants? That doesn’t seem to be the case, based on the company’s history.
“Apple has really done a very good job at standing on the shoulders of the giants that came before them and taking things forward,” says Ramon Llamas, a research director on the devices and displays team for International Data Corporation. “They did that with smartphones. They did that with smartwatches.” Success here hinges on how Apple executes on this new Siri and whether device owners feel like the updates are genuinely useful.
At that same WWDC 2024 event, Apple announced Siri’s ChatGPT integration, where users could route their voice questions to OpenAI’s chatbot, if they wanted, for answers.
Siri’s stand-alone app is a move by Apple to make the experience of using its voice assistant feel up to the standards users might expect from an AI tool in 2026. This will let users return to chats they’ve had with Siri and continue previous threads. So, in addition to being a voice assistant, the Siri experience is now more fleshed out, with the ability to send text requests as well as upload files.
Siri AI can answer questions related to the content on a user’s screen.Courtesy of Apple
Siri is also moving into the camera app, offering a Google Lens–style experience where users can ask questions about what they are seeing.
Apple is known for protecting user privacy. Even so, some experts are still nervous about how user’s personal data will be accessed.
“It could have good benefits, make you super efficient, and be really helpful, but it does make the privacy issue a little bit more murky,” says Marshini Chetty, a computer scientist at University of Chicago who focuses on privacy and human-computer interaction.
When Apple launched its ChatGPT integration for Siri, it obscured the IP addresses of users and had OpenAI not store user requests—the company appears to be taking a similar, privacy preserving approach with this launch. In today’s presentation, Apple highlighted Siri’s on-device processing.
At the same time as Apple leans into a more powerful, AI-boosted Siri, the cultural backlash to generative AI continues to reverberate with users. While some people are obsessed with AI-powered tools, others do their best to abstain from using them or bemoan generative AI’s inevitable encroachment into the apps they use every day.
“In many cases, they don't want these AI features,” says Serge Egelman, an online privacy and security expert at UC Berkeley. “At the same time, all of these companies are invested in this. That's why it's getting shoved down everyone's throats, regardless of whether they actually want it.”
I’m excited to go hands-on with Apple’s revamped AI assistant later this year to see how much Siri has actually changed. When I recently gave Google’s Gemini access to all of my personal data, in hopes of better automations and more finely attuned outputs, I was surprised at just how well the tool performed, and I was creeped out by the deep insights it gleaned from my unfiltered information. Hey Siri, will you feel the same? Let’s chat and find out.
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