Apple's Siri used to be the bleeding edge of what smart assistants can do, back in 2011 when Apple originally integrated it into the iPhone. That was a long time ago, and things have changed. Once ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude launched and showed the world what a truly smart chatbot can do, Siri felt very basic in comparison. Apple promised an overhaul back in 2024, and it still hadn't happened prior to today, despite constant promises that the company is working hard to improve its smart assistant.
Siri can actually chat with you now.
Ahead of WWDC 2026, a bevy of reports and rumors gave us an outline of what we can expect from the new Siri, including a standalone app, a redesign, a Google Gemini-based AI brain (with options to invoke other third-party chatbots), all with a focus on privacy.
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Now, during the opening WWDC 2026 keynote, Apple officially introduced the new Siri. So what has changed?Well, Apple did team up with Google to build new versions of what it calls "Apple Foundation Models," which is the company's lingo for AIs that are good at different things, including speech recognition, image, and video generation. The most important thing this new architecture "unlocks" is the new Siri. It's telling that Apple literally talked about privacy before it even started showing us any new Siri features, ensuring the users that their data is never stored by Apple.
