Apple Ships iOS 27 and Its Gemini-Powered Siri AI

Apple released iOS 27 on Monday, and with it the public debut of Siri AI — the ground-up rebuild of its assistant that the company first promised in 2024 and has been quietly slipping ever since. The update ships alongside iPadOS 27, watchOS 27 and macOS 27 Golden Gate, but Siri is the only part of the release anyone has been waiting on, and it arrives with a longer list of conditions attached than Apple's marketing suggests.

The new assistant is built around four things the old Siri could not do. It has personal context, meaning it can reach into Messages, Mail, Photos and Notes to retrieve something you were sent rather than telling you it found results on the web. It has onscreen awareness, so it can read what is in front of you and act on it. It has broader world knowledge. And it can take cross-app actions — chaining a request through Messages, Music or Reminders without being handed off. There is also a dedicated Siri app now, which keeps a conversation history and syncs it across devices over iCloud, and on the Mac the assistant is wired directly into Spotlight. Engadget, which tested it ahead of release, reported that the assistant was genuinely capable of answering complex questions and executing multi-step prompts.

The engine underneath is not entirely Apple's. The company struck a deal with Google to use Gemini models in building the system that powers Siri AI — an arrangement BitsMinds covered when it was announced at WWDC in June and previewed in May. Separately, iOS 27 ships an Extensions framework that lets users choose which model sits behind Apple Intelligence features such as Writing Tools and Image Playground. Three providers are available at launch: OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude. Users can assign different Siri voices to different providers, which keeps Apple's own answers audibly separate from a third party's — a small design decision that says a great deal about how carefully Apple wants to fence off responsibility for what these models say.

The hardware requirements are where the release narrows sharply. iOS 27 itself runs on every iPhone back to the iPhone 11 and the second-generation iPhone SE, but Siri AI needs an iPhone 15 Pro or newer — a 2023 cutoff that leaves a large share of the installed base on the old assistant. iPhone 17 models get better on-device speech recognition and dictation, and the voice customisation options, which let you adjust the assistant's speaking pace and expressiveness, require an iPhone 17 Pro or iPhone Air. On iPad, Siri AI is limited to iPad mini, iPad Air and iPad Pro models with an M1 chip or later.

Geography narrows it further. Siri AI launches in English only, with additional languages promised later in 2026. It is not available at launch on iPhone or iPad in the European Union, and it remains unavailable in China while Apple works through regulatory approval there. Two of the largest smartphone markets in the world therefore get iOS 27 without the feature that defines it.

The rest of the release is housekeeping by comparison: further refinements to the Liquid Glass design language across iOS and iPadOS, expanded child safety features, and Mac-specific interface work in macOS 27 including uniform toolbars and edge-to-edge sidebars. None of it is what today is about. After two years in which Apple's AI story was mostly a sequence of delays, lawsuits and a quietly registered domain name, the company has finally shipped the thing — to a subset of its devices, in one language, in most but not all of the world.