First impressions of the new Siri AI
iOS 27 is finally out, and after a confusing upgrade process (my phone told me it was installing iOS 26.7 after I’d asked it to install iOS 27, even though it did actually install iOS 27), I’ve had a chance to play with the new Siri AI.
I know it’s been available for a few months as part of the iOS beta, but I’m not one to try betas on my main device. My test device is an iPhone 12 mini from 2020, which doesn’t support Apple Intelligence whereas my main device, an iPhone 16 Pro Max does.
It’s a significant upgrade. Apple has finally binned the old intent-based Siri and started over with a modern agentic system that uses LLMs. Over the past year or so, with the exception of Siri, I’ve only found myself having to use an old intent-based chatbot a handful of times - and boy have they aged badly! I say that as someone who used to spend a lot of time building and testing the things. It was clear to me as far back as 2022 that these intent-based chatbots were eventually going to be replaced by LLMs. ‘Agentic’ wasn’t really a thing yet, although if you take the core concept of an agent, a loop that runs until the LLM determines that the request has been fulfilled, then this was certainly something that existed in rudimentary form even back then. It’s surprising therefore that it took Apple this long to ditch the old Siri.
On iOS (and iPadOS - they are the same OS really), the new Siri AI is very impressive.
Take this example: A friend sent me a name, phone number and email address of a guy who fitted their air conditioning over WhatsApp. I wanted to email him for a quote, but it was 8pm on a Friday and I was having dinner. I asked Siri to extract the details on screen and remind me to send the email on tomorrow. It did so perfectly.
Another example: my local council has decided to change the days our bins are collected - recycling, food, garden and general waste are on various days, some every week, some every 2 weeks. I was able to pull up the Basingstoke Council web page with the information on it, and ask Siri to spot the pattern, create recurring calendar events to remind me to put the bins out, and importantly, schedule events for 8PM on the evening before. It’s no good being reminded on the day when they are typically collected before 7:30 in the morning!
Later that day I was planning a family outing to a local farm so my 2 year old could see the animals. I had the web page open with the address on it. I asked Siri to add it to the calendar tomorrow for 1pm, and to make sure the address was set in the calendar appointment. It did it just as I asked. So when I get in the car and plug my phone into CarPlay, I can just tap the appointment and my directions are already set. Little things like this that would have involved frustratingly trying to copy and paste an address from a web page are now just a lot easier.
I have noticed some regressions in speech recognition. Mostly it’s improved, but it keeps confusing my wife’s name Mandi for one of the several people in my address book called Andy. I’ve accidentally sent a message to at least one of these Andy’s so far. Not great. I may have to rename them all to ‘Andrew’ if this continues.
My only criticism would be Siri on the Apple Watch. I’m not sure why, but it’s very slow and far less reliable. I know on phones and iPads Apple does as much processing locally as it can. They say for privacy reasons, but it also saves on their cloud compute costs too. I doubt the Apple Watch can do much AI locally, and so I wonder if it’s either trying and failing, or it’s using the phone, and it’s just unreliable. The state of Siri on the Apple Watch is the only time I’ve regretted upgrading and wished for the old intent-based Siri back.
I also have a couple of HomePods around the house. These do not support the new Siri AI. This is a big shame and I wish Apple could have figured out a cloud based solution to get it working on them, or if not, let me just connect another LLM rather then be forced to use the limited version they came with. The old Siri never really lived up to the promise Apple repeatedly showed off in its adverts and keynotes, and so it’s pretty poor form that they don’t seem to be getting access to the new Siri. Even a much simpler version of Siri that is less ‘agentic’ but can understand things better would be a start.
Overall Siri AI is an interesting step towards the future where LLM powered Agents can do useful things your phone, with all the guardrails that you don’t get with other more ‘homebrew’ solutions. It’s perhaps the best reason to upgrade to iOS / watchOS 27, if you can live with the watch version being a bit buggy.