After years of false starts and public disappointment, Apple is finally ready to show the world its redesigned Siri. According to reporting from tech outlets, the company will unveil the overhauled assistant at its Worldwide Developers Conference in June, marking a significant shift in how users interact with one of its most important digital products.
The most substantial change is structural: Apple wants to turn Siri into a full-blown chatbot, with an app-type interface that will compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT. Apple is testing a standalone Siri chatbot app for iOS 27, according to reporting from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. This reverses an earlier position; Gurman previously said that Apple was not going to develop a standalone Siri app, but it appears plans have changed.
Beyond the app itself, Siri will gain an "Ask Siri" button that lets users make requests in natural language, either by text or voice. Siri's upgrade, which has been in development for years, is expected to incorporate advanced generative AI capabilities, making interactions more conversational and context-aware than ever before. The assistant will be able to access personal data, too: Siri is being designed to leverage personal data from messages, emails and notes to complete requests, and will also be able to execute tasks within apps, access news and conduct web searches.
The Google Question
What powers this new Siri is where things get complicated for a company known for vertical integration. Apple has chosen to work with Google, a longtime partner, to power AI features like Siri, determining that "Google's technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models and we're excited about the innovative new experiences it will unlock for our users".
The smarter, more capable version of Siri that Apple is developing will be powered by Google Gemini, with Apple planning to pay Google approximately $1 billion per year for a 1.2 trillion parameter artificial intelligence model. To put that in perspective, the current cloud-based version of Apple Intelligence uses 150 billion parameters, so the Gemini model is vastly more powerful.
The financial commitment signals how serious Apple is about fixing Siri. Yet it also reflects a pragmatic reality: the company's own AI models were not ready. Apple weighed using its own AI models for the LLM version of Siri, and also tested options from OpenAI and Anthropic, but it decided to go with Gemini. Notably, Apple plans to continue working on its own models and will transition to an in-house solution when its LLMs are capable enough. Apple is already working on a 1 trillion parameter cloud-based model that could be ready as soon as 2026.
The Privacy Question
Apple's partnership with Google raises an obvious concern: data protection. The company has built its marketing around privacy, positioning itself against data-hungry competitors. Here's the commitment: to maintain Apple's privacy pledge, the Gemini AI will run directly on Apple devices and iCloud service, rather than on Google's servers. Unlike the current ChatGPT integration where more complex queries are explicitly handed off to OpenAI with clear branding, the upcoming Gemini-based enhancements will run invisibly in the background, with prototypes of the more personalized Siri showing no Google or Gemini branding whatsoever.
This invisibility is strategic. Apple will fine-tune Gemini's model independently, so the user experience feels entirely Apple-native even though Google's technology runs underneath.
The Timing Challenge
The June announcement comes after significant delays. The latest iPhone software, iOS 26.4, does not deliver the large Siri overhaul that many users wanted, introducing instead several improvements including an AI playlist generator in Apple Music and additional emoji characters. Apple promised that those features would appear before the end of 2026.
When will users actually get the new Siri? The improvements are still expected to be a part of the iOS 27 and macOS 27 updates, with the official announcement of the reimagined Siri expected to happen during WWDC 2026. That announcement is likely happening on June 8. But announcements and availability are different things. There have already been so many delays, even just in the past two months, that it's hard to know how substantive the first parts of the Siri overhaul will be.
What's clear is that Apple's Siri has finally caught up with public expectations. Whether it ships on schedule is another matter.
WWDC 2026 runs June 8-12. More information about Google Gemini is available from Google.