Siri AI is already changing the way I use my iPhone

iOS 27 exited the developer world today with the launch of its first public beta. I’ve been testing the new OS since early June, looking for quirks and seeing if it could live up to the hype Apple promised at the keynote.

This year’s iOS upgrades are what we might call… Snow Leopard update. This means that it highlights new features and instead focuses on fixing things that are broken and speeding up processes across the operating system. App launches, image search results, and AirDrop transfers should be faster. Messages now supports inline replies and end-to-end encryption for RCS messages. Liquid Glass has become more precise, with better clarity around hard edges and text. These are all great updates, especially for those with older iPhones. But the biggest and most anticipated change in this update is that Apple has finally, in fact, shipped a revamped Siri AI, in the form of a subscription beta program. And this time, I think Apple may have already done that. Or at least laid the foundation for a successful version of Siri.

Last week, I was trying to decide if I would have time to go to a free concert in town. The show was four hours long with three acts, and I really only wanted to see one. I couldn’t find the order in which the bands were performing on the event page, which meant this was a perfect opportunity to stress-test Siri AI. So I swiped down from the top of the screen and asked, “In what order are the bands playing?” Siri spun its new little wheel for a few seconds, then correctly told me the information I was hoping for: The band I wanted to see was finally playing.

The promise of the new Siri AI is to change the way you use your phone. Previously, you would go to an app and tell 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 sift through all the apps and information available to it to handle the rest. So when I asked about the concert, Siri looked at what was on the web page, searched the web, found the answer, and gave it to me. I didn’t need to flip through browser tabs or look at the band’s Instagram page; It was just there.

In the month I’ve been using Siri AI, it’s surprised me in a few different ways. On my first day of beta testing during Apple’s dev conference, I was able to ask the question “Can you add my WWDC summaries to my calendar?” Siri searched my email, analyzed the data, and added six individual events at their correct times to my calendar. I will note that it can only be added to my file apple Calendar, but I’ll know why soon.

These interactions changed my brain chemistry quite a bit. Now, I almost always try Siri first, just to see if it can perform the action I need or answer a simple question. This practically prevented me from opening the browser for most things, since it’s easier, faster, and more fun to just swipe down from the top of the screen and type a prompt.

The on-screen awareness was probably the most useful addition for me. Being able to ask Siri what’s on my screen saves me a lot of clicking. When it’s able to take action from that on-screen awareness, like adding an event to my calendar or directing me to an address on my screen, it’s even better.

More often than I expected, Siri is able to do what I ask it to do, and when it performs a fairly complex task, it feels like magic. But when I hit the wall, I remembered why it takes a little work to get into the “it just works” world where Siri works no Work is the exception, not the rule.

Siri’s ability to translate your request into a specific action appears to be one of the key areas where Apple is still working out the kinks. For example, when I asked it to “Remind me to buy these tickets when they go on sale” while looking at the concert page, it simply sent a reminder called “Buy these tickets when they go on sale.” I had to be careful when I said, “Buy tickets for this “When they go on sale” prompts Siri to actually look at my screen and search the web for ticket availability. Most of the time, asking Siri to “direct” me to a location didn’t do anything, but “direct” me to a location did. I imagine its word association might get better over time as more data comes in, but when the whole point is to be able to talk to a computer in natural language and not rely on pronouncing keywords, it can be frustrating.

Right now, if you’re using the Siri AI preview on iOS 27 beta, only Apple apps have access to the new Siri capabilities. If you live within the Apple ecosystem, all is well. Your data is likely inside messages, mail, and photos, and when you want to take action, you add to-do items to reminders and notes. I use a few of these apps daily, and when they work together, like adding a list of events from my email to my calendar, they’re truly a glimpse into the future. But if you ask Siri, “When did Daniel say he was free to play?” Dota“So Siri would have no idea, because Daniel and I only message each other through Telegram, which the system doesn’t have access to.

The two main updates that developers need to implement to support Siri AI are entities and intents. Entities represent the type of data an app can contain, such as an image, recipe, playlist, or note. If an app adds entities to Siri AI, Siri knows exactly what kind of data it can pull from that app to use in your personal context. Conversely, Intent tells Siri what it can actually do with that data, like play, save, or delete. App entities and objects allow Siri to control and pull data from it, and Siri’s semantic layer understands your words. Application entities and objects allow those semantics to control and pull data from it.

And if your digital life exists mostly outside of Apple apps, it will take some time for the apps you need to work well with Siri AI. This definitely won’t happen during the public beta. Developers can now create entities and intents against the iOS 27 SDK, but until the SDK itself comes out of beta, you, the user, are out of luck; They can’t actually push Siri AI updates to their apps until the full iOS 27 release is available in the fall.

Apple depends on a lot Developers need to update their apps to support the new Siri, but it looks like we haven’t seen this before. Practically every time Apple added an important new feature, like Dark Mode or iPad apps, developers had to put in an effort to make it work properly. I imagine the difference is that most of the previous updates directly affected the user experience within the developer’s app. This time, Apple is asking developers to update their apps to improve the Siri experience.

The developers I’ve spoken to have told me that while they’re very excited about these new capabilities, updating their apps to support them is a pretty huge task. “The conceptual challenge for developers is to create comprehensive support for every screen and function within the app,” says Matthew Cassinelli, who worked at Workflow, the company Apple acquired to become Shortcuts. “But moving to agent-based models allows specialized applications to display relevant data dynamically, making them more useful for users who may not open those specific applications frequently.”

An example of this is LookBack: Contact history program. The app shows you who you’ve recently added to your phone’s contacts, and if you forget to open it but ask Siri “Who did you meet at the conference last week?” He can use the application to view information.

I can back this argument that Siri will help show up 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 bigger question I have in mind is whether or not players like Google are interested in making Siri more capable. Google makes most of its revenue from serving ads, and if instead of making you open Gmail to find the information you’re looking for, Siri can simply display that information at the top of your screen, Google loses out on that revenue. However, Google does exactly the same thing with AI overviews, so it was clearly preparing for a world where AdSense revenue is not its main revenue stream.

The primary motivation I can see for Google adopting full Siri AI support is consumer choice. If one email app supports Siri AI to its full potential and Gmail doesn’t, I’m more likely to use the other app. I want Siri to continue performing these experiences, pulling in my personal context and performing actions on my behalf. If I start having barriers to what the app can do, I might start looking for another one. Whether Google’s stronghold is strong enough to keep most people around is another question.

All of this is still a work in progress. Not only is this a beta OS, it’s a beta version of Siri. It is just a partial version of the full experience we are promised in the future. It’s impressive, but what really matters still comes afterward. Developers need to add support for Siri AI to live up to its potential. And Siri AI needs to direct and search for your requests correctly more often than you get stuck. So far, I’ve been surprised by how much it can do.

By the way, the party was great.

Photography by David Immel/The Verge