I tried Siri AI and the new Apple Intelligence – here are my initial thoughts
I've been playing with Siri AI at WWDC and it's much better than I expected
Quick Summary
Siri AI is coming with iOS 27 later this year – likely September.
I managed to try it out while at WWDC 26 in Cupertino. Here are the results, so far.
We’ve been waiting a while (since WWDC 24, if you’ve been counting), but the new, more personalised and contextualised Siri will finally arrive this year. It comes in the form of Siri AI, and was revealed at Apple’s WWDC26 alongside new Apple Intelligence features, which include new photo editing tools and Suggestions in messages.
I’ve now had a few demos of the new Siri AI, but I have also been playing with it myself on my iPhone 16 Pro Max using the iOS 27 Developer Beta. I must admit, I have been pleasantly surprised so far.
Siri AI actually does what I want
There are a few things I have asked Siri AI to do. I started with asking it to find my Swedish auntie’s marinade recipe that my mum had sent me in Messages. The recipe is in Swedish and my mum sent it as a photo back in 2023.
My prompt to Siri AI was: “Can you find the BBQ marinade recipe I was sent by Mum”. Much to my surprise, Siri summarised the conversation my mum and I had had about the marinade and highlighted a couple of messages at the bottom of the results in the "sources". Tapping one of the two listed messages took me to the photo I needed.
I also asked Siri AI to tell me which dates in July I could do a lunch meeting (turns out I am pretty free in July except a few dates, which Siri listed for me), and I asked Siri AI to create an event every Friday in July from 6pm to 8pm, which it managed without a problem.
When my friend Aaron sent me a message in the Messages app asking if I was free for dinner on a specific date, I asked Siri to check my calendar and find alternatives when it noted a clash. It then constructed a message in a similar tone to the rest of our conversation to respond to him.
Other examples I tested Siri AI with included asking it to pull a packing list from an email I received with information about WWDC, and add it to a Reminder list with a note to pack when I got back to the hotel. I didn’t tell it which hotel but Siri knew.
When I asked it to show me photos from my holiday to Sweden last year, it pulled up all the photos I took, along with ones from this year. And asking it how much I spent on train station parking last month also returned the right result (based on me prompting it with the sender to look for in my email receipts).
There are a few things Siri AI didn’t quite manage, yet
Of course, Siri AI is still very much in beta, and with this come a few dropouts and errors.
While it found the messages with the photo of the marinade I was talking about earlier, it didn’t pull out the photo in its initial response. I had to click on the message from the source, then the photo and then I was able to ask Siri to translate it, which it then did brilliantly.
When I asked it how much I spend on my window cleaning every month, it told me I had a direct debit going out (which it knew from my emails), but despite the email saying the amount, Siri didn’t give me this.
I also asked it for my driving licence number, knowing that I had a photo of it in my Photos, but it didn’t retrieve this surprisingly.
What about the new Apple Intelligence features?
As for the Apple Intelligence features, these seem to work very well. The Reframe feature for photos is very impressive, allowing you to adjust the composition of a shot after you took it.
I got it to reframe a shot of me next to a WWDC sign, and it handled my patterned dress, as well as the translucent sign. Extend also works well, expanding a photo by up to 25% on each side and I had good results with Clean Up too, especially when selecting the "High Quality" option.
Suggestions also work well, with helpful buttons like "Add to Calendar" appearing when someone suggests a date in a message, and the ability to use natural language to describe a calendar invite is much more user-friendly than filling in all the fields separately.
I enjoyed playing around with creating Shortcuts using natural language, too – my test subject Aaron is going to enjoy receiving a message when I leave the Apple Visitor Centre after I finish this story.
A couple of things worth remembering
I use Apple’s native apps, including Mail, Messages and Apple Photos, so I am probably one of the best use cases for Siri AI at the moment.
In the Developer Beta of Siri AI, it wasn’t able to use context from an open WhatsApp chat screen with Aaron to search my calendar for the new lunch date that had been suggested, instead only pulling from the initial message in Messages about dinner.
There will also no doubt be a number of other hurdles Siri and third-party developers still need to overcome.
But from my interactions so far, Siri AI is head and shoulders above the current assistant, which, is quite frankly useless in comparison. It’s taken a couple of years more than I'd have liked, but so far, Siri AI actually seems to be pretty good.
