Siri. The question nobody bothered asking anymore, because the answer was always disappointing. "Here’s what I found on the web." Three links, zero relevance.
That changes now.
At WWDC 2026 — Apple’s annual developer conference — Apple introduced a fundamentally new Siri. The old Siri was an alarm-calendar-timer thing with barely functional web search. The new Siri is a real AI assistant (a program that learns from enormous amounts of text and answers questions) — and the brain behind it comes from Google: Gemini.
The Deal That Explains Everything
Apple is currently paying Google around a billion dollars per year to let Gemini power Siri’s brain. For a company that spent years insisting it would do AI on its own terms, that’s a remarkable U-turn. But an honest one. The old Siri was simply too weak.
The result: Siri can now hold real conversations. You can follow up, clarify, and restart — without starting from scratch each time. Siri also reads your screen in real time. Got a text with flight details? Just say "add this to my calendar and text mum the arrival time." Siri reads the screen, creates the event, sends the message. No copy-pasting required.
What’s Free — and What Costs Money?
The new Siri comes with iOS 27, and iOS 27 is a free update for all current iPhones. No subscription, no extra charge. iPhone 15 or newer gets the full experience. Older devices will receive updates too, but not necessarily every feature.
There’s no "Siri Pro" with an extra fee. At least not currently.
What About My Data?
Fair question. Apple’s approach here actually sounds thought-through: simple tasks — setting alarms, dictating notes, looking up contacts — still run entirely on-device. Only complex requests that genuinely need Gemini go to the cloud (external computing servers). Apple calls this "Private Cloud Compute" and promises that data isn’t stored or used for training further AI models.
Whether you believe that is a personal call. Apple’s privacy track record is, however, better than most competitors.
Is This for Me or Just Developers?
Definitely for regular iPhone users. No API, no terminal, no technical knowledge needed. You talk to your phone, and your phone answers considerably smarter now.
Once iOS 27 is available — rolling out gradually as of today — you can test Siri with real follow-up questions, ask it to act based on what’s on your screen, and review past conversations in the new dedicated Siri app. This is what Siri should have been years ago. Better late than never.
One side note: WWDC 2026 was Tim Cook’s final keynote as Apple CEO. He hands the reins to John Ternus, Apple’s hardware chief, in September. Whether that helps Apple’s AI strategy — we’ll see.
For now: Siri is finally no longer a running gag.