After years of being the punchline of the AI race, Siri is getting a real second act in iOS 27. In a hands-on review, The Wall Street Journal’s Nicole Nguyen says the overhauled assistant is no longer just a polite search redirect. It can see what’s on your screen, look at the world through the camera, and search your own messages, photos, notes, and mail — then act on what it finds.
The moment that sold her was mundane. At a parking machine, she asked Siri for her license plate number. It pulled the plate from a photo of her vehicle-registration renewal notice and read it back. “Wait a minute,” she wrote. “This new Siri actually helps?” After months of testing the highs and the misses, she says the public can now try it, too, with iOS 27.
Not every iPhone gets the new brain
Nguyen is blunt about the split. Siri AI is limited to Apple Intelligence devices: iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 16, and newer. Older phones get iOS 27’s other polish — she is particularly fond of a slider that dials back the “liquid glass” look — but not the new assistant. “Sorry,” she says in the companion WSJ video. “I don’t make the rules.”
What sets this Siri apart from ChatGPT or Claude, she argues, is access to the phone itself: on-screen awareness, the camera, and personal context, with privacy controls and an off switch.
Three things she tested
• On-screen awareness. Swipe down from the middle of the display and Siri behaves like a chatbot that can see the current screen. Nguyen pointed it at a pastry-class video and asked what the cakes were called; it identified tarte tropéziennes. She then opened a school email, asked Siri to add the listed items to a new Reminders list called “Back-to-School,” and it did.
The same brain can hallucinate. Siri is powered in part by Google’s Gemini, she notes, and like any large language model it can invent details. It confidently labeled a colleague’s photo as the ruins of Derrynane Abbey. The real spot was St. Mary’s Church in County Cork, Ireland — a two-and-a-half-hour drive away.
• The camera. Open Camera, swipe, and Siri can rate a snack’s nutrition or split a restaurant check. Point it at a receipt, tap the items you ordered, and it calculates tax, fees, and tip, then offers Apple Cash or a total you can Venmo. A lone biscotti scored “very low nutritional value”; add a banana and the rating improves to “okay.”
• Personal context. Siri can search Messages, Mail, Notes, Photos, and other on-device data. “What shoes did Belinda recommend?” produced an answer from texts. “Find photos of a croissant in the south of France” returned shots from Villefranche-sur-Mer and Nice. Limits remain: Signal and WhatsApp chats are not searchable unless those apps opt in, and Google Photos may not be supported yet.
Privacy, Gemini, and a caveat
Requests that need a bigger model or outside knowledge go through Apple’s Private Cloud Compute, which Nguyen describes as shielding data from both Apple and Google. Users who still do not want it can turn Siri AI off in Settings.
MacDailyNews Take: Her verdict is measured, but very hopeful for those of us who’d given up on Siri long ago. The new Siri is a genuine upgrade and already on the phone, so she says people should try it. She is also keeping Claude and ChatGPT on speed dial. Magical when it connects the dots inside your iPhone, but, like all LLMs, still fallible at times.
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