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Siri has always<\/strong> been good at timers, alarms, phone calls and switching on the lights. But ask it anything that requires holding two facts together and iPhone users have spent the past three years opting instead for ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude.<\/p>\n That\u2019s all about to change.<\/p>\n Apple has been promising a smarter Siri since 2024. It ran advertisements for features that did not exist, pulled them, and admitted the work would take longer than it thought. Fifteen months later and many false starts, that Siri is finally due on iPhones next month, alongside new models, including Apple\u2019s first folding phone.<\/p>\n Siri AI can search and reason across a user\u2019s messages, e-mails, photos, notes and calendar<\/p>\n Apple introduced Siri AI<\/a> at its developer conference on 8 June, describing an entirely new version of the assistant built on Apple Intelligence with three additions: personal context understanding, broad world knowledge and on-screen awareness. A series of developer betas have been released since then, the sixth arriving on 17 August<\/a>.<\/p>\n As a conversational assistant, Siri AI does what its rivals have done for years:<\/p>\n None of that would be worth much on its own. After all, OpenAI, Google and Anthropic got there first and their models are better known. What Apple has that those companies do not is the phone in your hand.<\/p>\n Apple\u2019s term for this is personal context understanding. Siri AI can search and reason across a user\u2019s messages, e-mails, photos, notes and calendar. The examples Apple gives are deliberately mundane: find the restaurant a friend recommended in a message months ago, pull a confirmation number out of an old hotel e-mail, bring up the photos from a particular trip. Anyone who has scrolled back through a WhatsApp thread hunting for an address will recognise the problem.<\/p>\n Assistant vs chatbot<\/p>\n That is the difference between an assistant and a chatbot. ChatGPT does not know what is in your inbox. Siri AI, with the user\u2019s permission, does \u2013 and Apple says the index it searches resides on the device rather than on a server.<\/p>\n The second half is action. Apple has extended App Intents, the framework through which an app declares what it contains and what it can do. Content published that way becomes discoverable in Spotlight\u2019s semantic index, so Siri can find it. Capabilities published that way become operations Siri can invoke, so Siri can carry them out. On-screen awareness covers whatever is currently displayed.<\/p>\n Read: Apple announces big iPad, MacBook price hikes<\/a><\/p>\n In practice, that collapses a familiar sequence \u2013 where you find the app, open it, navigate the menus, locate the item, perform the action \u2013 into a spoken sentence.<\/p>\n Third-party apps only participate if their developers do the work. Apple has said that personal context understanding extends to other apps when developers integrate with Spotlight. But until banking apps, travel tools and productivity software adopt App Intents properly, the experience will likely feel patchy.<\/p>\n Siri AI runs on the next generation of Apple Foundation Models, smaller ones on the device and larger ones on Apple servers through Private Cloud Compute. Apple says personal data handled by Private Cloud Compute is neither stored nor made accessible to the company, and that outside experts can verify this.<\/p>\n Apple has not abandoned its own models. It has, however, been candid about where the help came from. Its developer announcement<\/a> states that the next generation of Apple Foundation Models was custom-built in collaboration with Google and its Gemini models. Apple is buying model capability while keeping the device, the app interfaces, the personal index and the privacy layer.<\/p>\n The same logic runs through the Foundation Models framework, which now lets developers call Apple\u2019s models or, through a new language model protocol, models from other providers, Claude and Gemini among them. A separate framework, Core AI, lets developers run their own models locally on Apple silicon.<\/p>\n The most advanced on-device model needs 12GB of unified memory \u2013 iPhone Air, 17 Pro and Pro Max<\/p>\n Bloomberg\u2019s Mark Gurman reported in March that Apple was building a system called Extensions to let iPhone owners pick a third-party assistant in Settings. The Next Web reported in June<\/a> that the framework is present in the iOS 27 beta but switched off at Apple\u2019s end. Apple did not mention it at the developers keynote and has not confirmed it.<\/p>\n iOS 27 runs on iPhone 11 and later but Siri AI does not. Apple lists it for iPhone 16 models or later plus iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max. The most advanced on-device model, which drives the expressive voices and the improved dictation, needs 12GB of unified memory \u2013 today that means the iPhone Air, iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max.<\/p>\n South Africa included<\/p>\n\n
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