After roughly two years of delays, Apple revealed its new generative-AI enhanced assistant, Siri AI, at the company's annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). According to Apple, the assistant represents a major advance over the prior Siri: it can carry more natural, multi-step conversations, analyze files, draft emails, and interpret the environment using the device camera.
Capabilities
- Multi-step tasks: in demonstrations, Siri AI located nearby concert times for a favorite artist, set a reminder and then started playing the artist’s music.
- Photos integration: users can search photos with natural language, for example finding images taken at a particular location or event.
- Messages and Spotlight: in Messages, Siri can retrieve previously shared information such as addresses or times; on Macs, the assistant integrates into Spotlight to compare multiple documents, produce a table of differences and draft an email based on the results.
- Camera interpretation: Siri can analyze a photo of a meal to provide nutritional information or split an itemized restaurant bill among a group.
- Writing Tools: text composition, editing and review features have been significantly improved to match competing AI assistants.
- Dedicated Siri app: Apple showed a separate Siri app that lets users review past conversations and start new ones, with synchronization across iPhone, iPad and Mac.
Architecture and privacy
Apple said Siri AI is built on the Google Gemini model. The Apple Intelligence platform and Siri AI will run partly on-device and partly on Apple’s own secure clouds. Apple emphasized that privacy remains a priority.
Availability and restrictions
A key limitation is regional availability: Apple stated that the new AI features will not be available in the European Union or in China until regulatory issues are resolved in those regions.
Hardware requirements are also strict. The most powerful on-device AI models will only run on recent, higher-end devices. Apple listed supported devices such as the iPhone Air, iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max, and iPads with M4 or newer chips and at least 12 GB of RAM. On the Mac, full functionality will be supported on machines with M3 or later chips and at least 12 GB of memory.
Market reaction
Following the announcement, Apple’s share price fell about 1.4 percent.
Why this matters
The unveiling is notable because Apple had publicly outlined its AI strategy in 2024 but repeatedly postponed product rollouts, raising investor concern about falling behind in the AI race. With Siri AI, Apple aims to expand Siri’s capabilities to better match competitors such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google Gemini while balancing on-device processing and cloud services with an emphasis on privacy.
