Apple’s new Siri AI promises to revolutionise the iPhone – here’s how

Back in June at this year’s WWDC event, we first discovered what was in store for the next incarnation of Apple’s operating systems. The upcoming iOS 27, iPadOS 27, WatchOS 27, VisionOS 27 and macOS 27 Golden Gate will all feature the new Siri AI; a reinvented voice assistant with Apple Intelligence.

The new Apple Foundation models that power this new system have been built with Google Gemini but run on-device or via a private cloud. The data is only ever used for requests and never stored; it also can’t be accessed even by Apple.

The foundation models are deeply integrated across the operating systems and cover language, images, voice and text. This means that it can interact with you through every part of the operating system and almost every application.

More than just a voice assistant

Siri now has its own app in iOS 27 and across all of this year's new platforms. This allows you to revisit past conversations you’ve had, pick them up again, and start new ones. You can also still access Siri through the voice prompt of ‘Hey Siri’, by clicking on the Siri floating symbol or by holding down the main button on the top right of your phone.

Siri now has a more conversational interaction and allows you to ask follow-up questions or react to context. So if you’re in your messages, mail or music, you can easily ask questions around what’s in front of you for Siri to answer.

This same technology follows across iPadOS and even MacOS, where you can use the Spotlight tool to engage Siri and even use visual intelligence by selecting an area of the screen to reference.

Better image editing

The advances in Apple Intelligence aren’t limited to just Siri. The photo editing tools are now also powered by AI to deliver more advanced adjustments and generation. Firstly, the clean-up tool can remove larger objects, with more accurate results. There are now three options for the process, with ‘fast’ using on-device processing and ‘high quality’ using private cloud computing. There’s also an ‘auto’ option which will pick the best option depending on your current data connection.

A new ‘extend’ tool allows you to generate content beyond the edges of the photo for when you want to zoom out or change the ratio of the image. Meanwhile, the ‘spatial reframing’ tool lets you virtually adjust the angle that the picture was taken from, keeping the subject in the same place but changing the background. Both of these functions make use of private cloud computing for the full image generation.

These functions don’t just work on newly taken photos; you can apply them to older pictures in your library, even those not taken on an Apple device. The tools are also available directly in the lock screen wallpaper selection, so that you can better adjust your images to fit.

Image Playground gets more real

One area I’m quite excited about is the expansion of Image Playground in iOS 27 and beyond. This contains new generative models to enable it to produce a range of new image styles, including photorealistic images. This is achieved using private cloud computing and images contain IPTC metadata and hidden SynthID watermarks to show it’s been digitally generated.

As before, you can pick from people in your photo library (including multiple people) or from individual photos. The results can be output in different image ratios, such as landscape, portrait or square. While you can’t pick from your labelled pets in your library, you can take an individual picture of your pet and use that as a basis.

Notifications and context

Two new Apple Intelligence features are designed to save you time and help you avoid missing updates. Call context can surface helpful information when you’re on a call or messaging. So confirmation details for a hotel or flight booking can be easily surfaced without searching through past emails, and quick actions from messages can be set as reminders in a single click.

Notify Me is a function within Safari that can be used to stay up to date on changes within your favourite websites. The function can be set to check back monthly, weekly, daily or hourly, and you can ask it to look for things like a price change, a new feature or service or a registration or ticket sale opening. You could even set it to tell you when T3 writes something new about Apple – though expect daily updates!

Premium benefits

All the Apple Intelligence features will be made available to all users when the new versions of the software launch later this year, though initially in a beta form. There will, however, be some limits on the number of operations you can perform each day. Those with iCloud Plus memberships will have higher limits and will therefore be able to perform more AI operations.

This is a similar setup as we’ve seen with Google Gemini and ChatGPT, so it’s no surprise Apple is also adopting it. I also suspect those who will want to use it the most will already have one of the higher iCloud tiers, for all the other benefits it gives, so those hitting that daily limit should be minimal.

Historically, Apple has released its new line of iPhones in early September and this year is likely to be no different. New iPhone 18 models are expected, along with iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max handsets, as well as a possible iPhone Fold.

If you want to try out some of the new iOS 27 features, you can download the public beta on your phone today. Our article shows you exactly how to do it.