Apple announced the long-awaited revamp of its virtual assistant, reintroducing Siri as “Siri AI.” The new and improved Siri arrives amid concerns that Apple has fallen behind in artificial intelligence, getting off to a slow start during the rise of generative AI and continuing to delay major updates to its assistant until this year.
Siri AI, Explained
Siri AI is an upgraded version of Apple’s Siri digital assistant. Equipped with Apple Intelligence, Siri AI is designed to perceive its surroundings, understand context and compile real-time information. These abilities enable it to hold deeper conversations, answer a wider variety of queries and automate more complex tasks. It also comes with an advanced security system that keeps user data private, adding another layer of protection.
While competitors wasted no time pouring resources into AI products early on, Apple has taken the road less traveled and exercised restraint — and it’s a move that just might pay off. Here’s everything to know about Siri AI, including how it works, what it can do and how it stacks up against other popular assistants and chatbots on the market.
What Is Siri AI?
Siri AI is the latest version of Apple’s digital assistant integrated across its suite of products, including the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and AirPods. Powered by Apple Intelligence, Siri AI is designed to be more conversational, multimodal and grounded in personal context. It can access photos, messages, emails, the internet and on-device cameras to enrich its responses with real-time, personalized information.
Siri AI also demonstrates agentic capabilities, meaning that it can execute complex, multi-step tasks without human supervision. It can then leverage its integrations with Apple’s hardware ecosystem to perform actions across different apps and devices, serving as a more useful assistant for everyday situations.
While Siri AI carries on the Siri lineage, the original Siri never had the same contextual awareness, visual understanding and real-world knowledge as its successor. As a result, users can go beyond surface-level responses and engage in deeper interactions with Siri AI.
How Does Siri AI Work?
To make Siri’s upgrade a reality, Apple turned to a couple of its longtime rivals. At the end of 2025, the company allegedly agreed to pay Google $1 billion per year to build the next generation of its foundation models on Gemini’s technology, which the pair confirmed in early 2026 when they officially announced their partnership.
Although Apple may be shelling out a fortune to one of its fiercest competitors, the deal has delivered promising returns. The third generation of Apple’s foundation models features two powerful on-device models:
- AFM 3 Core: A massive large language model that contains 3 billion parameters to reduce latency without sacrificing quality. Siri AI can then perform tasks at a high level while operating efficiently.
- AFM 3 Core Advanced: A multimodal model that activates as few as 1 billion of its 20 billion parameters to complete an action. It’s responsible for allowing users to customize Siri AI’s expressiveness and producing accurate dictation.
Apple also tapped another tech giant, Nvidia, to help implement a feature it calls “private cloud compute,” a security system that simultaneously processes and encrypts user data for additional privacy. Under this setup, only a specific user can access their device’s data stored on the cloud, keeping it off-limits to all other individuals and Apple itself. Nvidia lent its graphics processing units to support confidential computations among three more foundation models:
- AFM 3 Cloud: A server-side model that prioritizes speed and efficient processing.
- AFM 3 Cloud (Image): A model that focuses on image generation and editing.
- AFM 3 Cloud Pro: A server-based model that enables agentic tool use and advanced reasoning.
What Can Siri AI Do?
Thanks to Apple Intelligence, Siri AI offers far more possibilities than its predecessor. Here are a few of its applications:
Customized Conversations
Users can quickly submit queries through typing or natural language. And because Siri AI remembers context, users can ask follow-up questions to continue the conversation. Its expressiveness and pace can also be adjusted for each user’s convenience.
Real-Time Updates
Siri AI can connect to the web, allowing it to provide real-time insights on sports games, weather patterns and other world events. It’s integrated with Apple CarPlay, too, so users can ask for directions and traffic updates without getting distracted.
Real-World Queries
Siri AI can access images, PDFs, screenshots and on-device cameras to inform its responses based on what’s on a user’s screen or in their surroundings. In the Apple Vision Pro, it uses spatial computing to identify and share more about physical objects.
Writing Suggestions
Users can ask Siri AI to generate rough drafts and edit written content in the Mail and Messages apps, as well as in third-party apps. It can even adopt a user’s particular tone and writing style to tailor communication to friends, family and other contacts.
Photo Edits
Users can either lightly touch up photos or make more extensive edits, such as expanding or reframing photos. Meanwhile, Image Playground and Image Wand let users generate images from written descriptions or simple sketches.
Daily Shortcuts
Siri AI comes with a “shortcuts” feature, in which users describe workflows that they want the assistant to automate. For example, it can schedule emails, search for and record a movie’s streaming availability and summarize the workday based on calendar events and notes.
How Siri AI Compares to Other Chatbots
Siri AI is a huge step up from its predecessor, making Apple much more competitive in the AI space. While Google’s Gemini has the advantage of a head start, early reviews have found Siri AI to hold its own against and even outclass Gemini in some scenarios. Of course, it’s still a ways off from other tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which is equipped with the reasoning to handle dense writing, coding, image generation and other complex tasks.
But directly comparing Siri AI to these products is difficult because Apple wasn’t necessarily aiming to build a more powerful assistant than its competitors. The company recognizes that Siri AI may already stand out for how familiar and accessible it is to Apple users, so there’s no need to pretend that it’s anything more than simply a useful tool for daily life.
In fact, Siri AI may be just one piece of the puzzle as Apple reportedly plans to redesign a slate of hardware for its smart home vision. With a new leasing program for Apple devices as well, it seems that Siri AI is intended to be integrated in personal networks of Apple products that prioritize digital privacy and everyday convenience — a unique philosophy that could set Apple apart as AI companies look to play a bigger role in society.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Siri AI?
Siri AI is Apple’s overhauled digital assistant that’s equipped with artificial intelligence features, referred to as Apple Intelligence. Incorporated across Apple’s hardware and applications, Siri AI can understand its surroundings and gather user context to deliver more personalized outputs in text, image, video and audio formats.
How is Siri AI different from the old Siri?
The original Siri was designed to provide basic responses to user queries, lacking the reasoning and contextual understanding to spark more customized, in-depth interactions. On the other hand, Siri AI is powered by foundation models that support real-time data processing, multimodality, agentic capabilities and high-quality outputs. As a result, Siri AI can handle far more intricate tasks and adapt faster to different situations than its predecessor.
Is data private when using Siri AI?
Yes. Apple uses a security system called “private cloud compute,” which encrypts user data as it’s being processed and stored in the cloud. This method ensures that only a device’s main user can access this data, blocking all other individuals and entities, including Apple itself.
Which devices support Siri AI?
Siri AI is available across Apple’s suite of devices, including the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, AirPods, Vision Pro headset and Apple CarPlay system.
