The first public beta for iOS 27 is now available for download, which means if you have a supported iPhone, you can try out the new Siri AI before it officially rolls out this fall. This public beta is equivalent to the third developer beta of the new iPhone software. While there are still several more developer betas to go this summer, the early software versions have been stable enough to represent what to expect in the final release.
I’ve been testing these developer builds of iOS 27 on an iPhone Air since the first one was released at WWDC 2026 and using Siri AI daily for just over a month. Excuse me for sounding hyperbolic, but Apple f*cking cooked. It took me maybe two weeks to learn what Siri AI could and couldn’t do, but once I figured that out, I now can’t imagine using my phone without the more intelligent assistant. Whenever I accidentally pick up my personal iPhone 16 Pro, which is still on iOS 26 and saddled with “Siri classic,” I feel like I’ve been knocked back to the stone age. Siri classic is dumb as rocks. © Raymond Wong / Gizmodo But first, a brief history lesson for those who have not followed the Siri drama. Back at WWDC 2024, Apple announced a massive revamp to its voice assistant, complete with “personal context,” a way for Siri to surface information from across your apps. For example, instead of manually searching in your inbox for flight information, you could simply ask Siri to find it for you. Want to know what your “lunch plans” are with your mom? Siri would find that info from your chat between you and your mom. Apple also demoed how Siri could understand what’s happening on your iPhone’s screen, providing information about what it “sees.”
