Siri AI is already changing the way I use my iPhone

iOS 27 escaped the development world today with the launch of the first public beta. I’ve been testing the new machine since early June, looking for quirks and seeing if it can live up to what Apple promised for the title.

This year’s iOS updates are what one would call a Snow Leopard update. This means that it is light on new features and instead focuses on fixing broken features and speeding up the process through the OS. App launch, Photos search results, and AirDrop transfers should all be faster. The Messages app now supports line-by-line replying and end-to-end encryption of RCS messages. Liquid Glass is very refined, with a clear clarity in hard edges and text. This is a great update, especially for those with older iPhones. But the biggest and most anticipated change in this update is that Apple has finally sent a redesigned Siri AI, as a beta program. And this time, I think Apple may have actually done it. Or it eventually laid the groundwork for Siri’s successful model.

Last week, I was trying to decide if I had time to go to a free concert in the city. The show was four hours long with three acts, and I only wanted to see one. I couldn’t find the plan the teams were doing on the demo page, which meant this was a good opportunity to test Siri AI. So I swam from the top of the screen and asked, “What order are the teams playing in?” Siri spun her little wheel for a few seconds, then told me exactly what I was hoping for: The team I wanted to see play last.

The promise of the new Siri AI is to change the way you use your phone. In the past, you went to an app and told the app what you wanted to do (call a car, set a timer, order lunch); now, you say what you want to do first, and Siri AI tries to check all the apps and information available to solve the rest. So when I asked about the concert, Siri looked at the content, then searched the web, found the answer, and showed it to me. I didn’t have to jump around opening tabs or checking the Instagram group page; it was right there.

In the month that I’ve been using Siri AI, it surprises me in many ways. On my first day of beta testing at Apple’s conference, I was able to ask “Can you add my WWDC posts to my calendar?” and Siri looked through my email, sorted it, and added six events with the correct times to my calendar. I realize, it could just add it to mine apple calendar, but I’ll find out why soon.

This connection has really changed my brain a bit. Now, I almost always try to use Siri first, to see if it can do what I want or answer a simple question. It has stopped me from opening my browser for many things, because it’s easier, faster, and more fun to just look down from the top of the screen and type quickly.

Computer awareness has probably been the most helpful for me. Being able to ask Siri about what’s on my screen saves me a lot of time. When it can do something from computer recognition, like adding an event to my calendar or directing me to an address on my computer, it’s great.

More often than I expected, Siri can do what I ask her to do, and when it does a difficult task, it’s like magic. But when it hits a wall, I’m reminded why it’s going to take some work to get to the environment where Siri “works”. no working is different, not normal.

Siri’s ability to translate your request into specific actions seems to be one of the main areas that Apple is still working on. For example, when I asked “remind me to buy these tickets when they go on sale” and looked at the concert website, it only reminded me to “buy these tickets when they go on sale.” I had to be careful to say “where to buy tickets this When they sell “activate Siri to look at my screen and search the Internet for a ticket.” And most of the time, asking Siri to “drive me” to a place didn’t do anything, but “direct me” to the place it did.

Currently, if you’re in the Siri AI demo on iOS 27 beta, Apple apps are the only ones that have access to Siri’s new powers. If you live within the Apple ecosystem, everything is fine. Your information may be in Messages, Email, and Photos, and when you want to take action, you’re adding actions to Reminders and Notes. I use these apps every day, and when they work together, like adding a list of events from my email to my calendar, it’s like a glimpse into the future. But when I ask Siri “When did Daniel say he was comfortable playing Dota?” then Siri will have no idea, because Daniel and I only send messages through Telegram, which the system does not have.

The two biggest changes that developers need to make to support Siri AI are organizations and goals. Entities represent the type of data an application can hold, such as an image, recipe, playlist, or text. If the app adds entities to Siri AI, Siri knows exactly what kind of data it can take from the app to use for your needs. On the other hand, an intent tells Siri what to do with the data, such as play, save, or delete. App groups and goals allow Siri to control and pull data from them, and the semantic part of Siri can understand your words. Groups and goals of the program allow semantics to control and pull data from them.

And if your digital life exists mostly outside of Apple apps, it will take time for the apps you need to play well with Siri AI. It will no longer happen in the beta version. Developers can now create entities and targets against the iOS 27 SDK, but until the SDK itself leaves beta, you, as a user, are out of luck; they won’t be able to push Siri AI updates to their apps until the full version of iOS 27 is available in the fall.

Apple is relying on a more on developers to update their apps to support the new Siri, but it’s not like we haven’t seen this before. Almost every time Apple adds a new feature, such as Dark Mode or iPad apps, developers have to work to make it work. The difference, I think, is that most of the previous changes have directly affected the user experience in the developer’s software. This time, Apple is asking developers to update their apps to improve Siri’s capabilities.

Developers I’ve talked to have told me that while they’re excited about the new technology, redesigning their apps to support them is a huge undertaking. “The mental problem of designers is to create adequate support for all the images and work within the program,” says Matthew Cassinelli, who works at Workflow, a company that will be bought by Apple and become Shortcuts. “But the shift to agent-based models allows specific apps to display more relevant information, making them useful for users who might not open those apps regularly.”

An example of this is LookBack: History app. The app shows you who you’ve recently added to your phone, and if you’ve forgotten to open it, ask Siri “Who did I meet at a meeting last week?” can use the program to display information.

I can buy the fact that Siri will support small apps that users often forget to open when it comes to small developers, who don’t make the five or six apps that most people use every day. But the big question in my mind is whether players like Google want to make Siri capable. Google makes a lot of money from advertising, and if instead of opening Gmail for you to find what you’re looking for, Siri can just spit out that information at the top of your screen, Google loses that money. That said, Google is doing the same with AI ads, so it’s clear that it’s been preparing for a world where AdSense isn’t its biggest investment.

The motivational driver I see for Google adopting full Siri AI support is consumer choice. If one email app supports Siri AI fully and Gmail doesn’t, I might use another app. I want Siri to continue to do this, pull mine up and do it for me. When I start running into roadblocks to what a program can do, I might start looking for another one. Whether Google’s security environment is strong enough to keep more people around is another question.

All of this is still a work in progress. Not only is this a beta OS, it’s also beta Siri. And it is only a small part of all the events that we are promised in the near future. It’s interesting, but what’s really important comes later. Developers should add support for Siri AI to achieve its full potential. And Siri AI needs to be efficient and search for your requests more often than not. So far, I’ve been amazed at how much is possible.

The concert was great, by the way.

Photo by David Imel / The Verge