Apple Siri has received an AI brain transplant. Try these 5 acclimatization guidelines.

ByTech Word News

For the past 15 years, I’ve been chilling with Siri, Apple’s virtual assistant on iPhones. Although she could perform a few basic tasks, such as adding appointments to the calendar and setting timers, Siri was so inferior that asking her for help was often counterproductive.

So when Apple announced in June that a “Deeply more capable” Siri Powered by Google’s artificial intelligence will arrive this year, I wondered: Will we finally see people talking to Siri on the train, on the streets, in the office?

That’s an important question because mainstream adoption of the new version of Apple’s assistant, Siri AI, could be a litmus test for AI’s impact on consumer technology in the coming years.

The people most interested in AI, including technology executives like OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, believe it will become more important than operating systems and applications. They envision a future where people talk to AI assistants to control their devices. In theory, the company with the most popular “agent” (techie speak for assistant) could win the AI ​​race that powers the future of computing.

A more moderate view—the approach Apple takes with Siri AI—is that chatbots can simply be another tool in the operating system, like many other features and apps that people can use or ignore.

To familiarize myself with the new Siri, I installed an early version of Apple’s next operating system, iOS 27, which includes Siri AI, on my iPhone and prodded Apple’s assistant with requests for about six weeks.

My first impressions were that Siri AI is a big improvement over Apple’s old assistant (honestly, that’s a low bar), but it hasn’t fundamentally changed the way I use the iPhone. I still mostly scroll through apps and only occasionally feel the need to ask Siri for help. However, Siri AI has some neat tricks that many people will enjoy for speeding up tedious tasks like editing photos, creating grocery lists, and updating address books.

Here’s what you need to know about what’s changed and a set of instructions to try when Siri AI becomes widely available this year.

You can chat with Siri AI in a variety of ways, some new and some old:

  • You can open a new Siri app and type or dictate prompts, similar to other chatbots such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude.

  • You can call the assistant by holding the button on the right side of the phone, or by saying “Hey Siri” followed by a question or request, just like in the past.

  • You can swipe down from the top center of the screen open a field that allows you to enter a search query or question for Siri.

Apple customers, including iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch owners, can test the new Siri on their devices by installing public betas — early, unfinished versions of operating systems — and then joining a waiting list to access Siri AI. However, since these are early days, Siri AI is occasionally buggy. (However, the assistant failed to translate the Chinese restaurant menu into English.) To avoid errors, I recommend waiting for the full release of the operating systems this fall before trying the assistant.

However, during my testing, I noticed a clear sign that Siri is on a brighter path. What annoyed me about the previous version of Siri was that whenever I asked her to add “Go to gym” to my calendar, the assistant kept adding “Go to Jim” as a calendar appointment, no matter how many times I corrected it.

When I asked Siri AI this week, the assistant responded, “Sorry, did you say go to the gym or go to Jim’s?”

“Ex,” I replied. The assistant made the appropriate entry in my calendar. Not perfect, but better.