For almost all of its 14-year existence, Siri has been a byword for tech that never lived up to its own hype. First unveiled alongside the iPhone 4s by Steve Jobs, Apple’s voice assistant promised contextual answers to your every passing thought, but instead ended up as a glorified alarm clock and missfiring punchline for C-tier Netflix sitcoms. And that was before the advent of Apple Intelligence in 2024, when it more or less imploded as the centrepiece of a new ChatGPT-powered era of computing.
So Apple has called one last mulligan on what is still its most tantalising invention – it has remade Siri from scratch again as part of its crucial AI do-over. Now, I know you’ve read this story before. Hell, I’ve written it more often than I’d care to admit in my decade or so covering the iPhone maker. So what’s different this time around? Two years ago, Apple Intelligence and a refreshed Siri were announced and then immediately shrouded in monastic secrecy ahead of a release date that never arrived. Today at WWDC 2026, I’ve seen multiple live demos for the beta versions of both tools, and they work. Not perfectly, but well enough to make me think they’ll be in good shape by the year’s end.
.png?trim=34,0,86,0&auto=webp&quality=75&width=1200 "My London: Trinny Woodall shares her secrets with cabbies, shops at Liberty and stays at Claridge’s")
As it turns out, paying Google a reported $1 billion-a-year for the use of its Gemini AI model may have been Apple’s smartest investment in quite some time. I’ll spare you the many technicalities behind what’s now called Siri AI, but comparing this tech’s old and new iterations is akin to judging the parallels between England’s ill-fated Euro 2016 team against Iceland and Thomas Tuchel’s squad a decade later. Same name, everything else has changed. From stock-checking merch drops to reimagining your photo library and aping Claude and ChatGPT as an honest-to-god chatbot, this is the stuff that’s worth knowing ahead of September when Apple Intelligence’s redemption arc is set to be completed as a free download…
1. It uses your data for smarter answers
Right now, when you talk to Siri (and it listens to you properly), it’ll refer anything remotely complex to ChatGPT for an answer of limited utility. Come Siri AI’s debut, it’ll be able to draw information from your messages, photos, contact details and more to answer contextual questions that are specific to you. That means you can ask stuff like, “Who is coming to my World Cup barbecue on Friday and what food are they bringing with them?” Better still, this data can be drawn from all relevant apps (think: WhatsApp, Instagram and the rest), so your social life needn’t be constrained to those mates who text you via blue bubbles. This was Apple Intelligence’s original unfulfilled promise, and it’s finally being delivered.
2. It’s the most convenient chatbot
Just as the best camera is the one you have on you, there’s not a huge difference between Gemini or ChatGPT when all you’re asking of them is basic, text-based tasks. So, the fact that you can now prompt your iPhone to map out a road trip to Cornwall with a single power button press is kind of a big deal. Especially since Siri AI’s dictation and comprehension skills have both seen a major upgrade. In one demo I saw for a similar scenario, Siri actually misheard the end of a prompt, but still managed to nail its answer by referring back to previous context from earlier in the chat. Mistakes happen with most chatbots; the best can correct themselves before you need to.
