Overview
- Apple announced a rebuilt Siri, called Siri AI, and a next-generation Apple Intelligence platform during its WWDC keynote on Monday, opening developer testing now and promising a U.S. English beta for users later this year.
- Siri AI is a conversational, multimodal assistant that can read on-screen content, act inside apps, sync conversation history via iCloud, and offer more natural, customizable voices through a dedicated Siri app.
- Apple said it adapted Google’s Gemini family of models under a multi-year agreement to create smaller, device-friendly models and will process queries on-device or through its Private Cloud Compute to protect user data.
- Regulators and legal issues are constraining the rollout: Apple will not launch Siri AI in the EU or China initially because of regulatory requirements, the European Commission publicly criticized Apple’s compliance approach, and the company recently agreed to a $250 million U.S. settlement over earlier AI advertising claims.
- The new features require recent hardware (iPhone 16, iPhone 15 Pro and newer iPads/Macs with M1 or later), developers can test features now, and the launch comes as Apple prepares a leadership transition that could shape how broadly the company deploys its AI services.