TL;DRApple unveiled Siri AI at WWDC 2026, a Gemini-powered rebuild with a standalone app, personal context search, and privacy-first cloud architecture.
Apple used its annual developer conference on Monday to unveil Siri AI, the most significant overhaul of its voice assistant in 15 years, rebuilt from the ground up on a custom Google Gemini model. The WWDC 2026 keynote at Apple Park also marked Tim Cook’s final appearance as CEO before he hands the role to hardware chief John Ternus on 1 September.
The rebuilt assistant arrives as a standalone app on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, functioning as a conversational chatbot alongside its existing system-wide presence. It can draw on personal context to search across messages, emails, and photos, execute multi-step commands across apps, answer questions about what is on screen, and go out to the web for up-to-date information. A dedicated Siri app uses iCloud to privately sync conversation history across devices.
Apple’s newsroom announcement framed the technology as “the next generation of Apple Intelligence” without naming Google, but multiple reports confirmed that Siri AI runs on a custom Gemini model of approximately 1.2 trillion parameters, licensed in a deal reported at roughly $1 billion per year. The architecture uses three tiers: simple tasks stay on-device using Apple’s own models, moderately complex requests run through Apple’s Private Cloud Compute, and the heaviest reasoning is routed to Google Cloud. Apple said that queries are processed statelessly, nothing is retained, and the contract bars Google from training future models on Apple user data.
