Siri AI shipped this month with iOS 27 as Apple’s rebuilt assistant: personal context, multi-step tasks, and a new home on the iPhone. That launch is one of the most-discussed Apple topics of the week for a blunt reason because Apple put parts of the feature on a waitlist. Users and Apple sites are cataloging misses: slower replies, odd Watch behavior, and moments where the old Siri would have simply worked.
The timing matters. New CEO John Ternus told the keynote audience the iPhone already is the ideal AI device. The home hub Apple is testing in employee houses was held for years until this assistant was ready. If Siri AI feels gated or brittle on the phone people already own, the next hardware story gets harder to sell. The company can point to a real software rewrite. The public conversation is still about the gap between the keynote and the first week of use.
MacDailyNews Take: Give it some time to roll out fully. We’re off the waitlist here: Siri AI is already a huge improvement over the previous version. It’s not even in the same universe.
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There’s still room for improvement but Siri AI has been pretty solid so far. I use it for most random questions now instead of relying on third-party chatbots.
I’ve been using it sporadically for a week and i’m unimpressed. It’s fine for general knowledge questions or driving directions (same as old Siri) but none of the Apple Intelligence stuff that was advertised works for me. Example: “Joe Smith told me his address in X city in a text message in May, what is his address?” Siri: do you want me to send ‘told me his address in X city in a text message in May’ to Joe Smith? Me: NO! Another example: “open my ‘finances’ note”. Siri: ‘you have no notes about finances’ (my first pinned note is ‘Finances 2026’!). If I specifically ask for the ‘Finances 2026’ note it will open but having to memorize such specific things defeats the purpose of having an ‘AI’ assistant.
I’ll keep trying occasionally but unless it starts working consistently for a majority of queries it’s going to get old fast for a lot of customers. As far as i’m concerned this is Siri Beta 2.0, it had better not take another 15 years for them to truly improve it.
It works OK, but I’m not a heavy AI user. It does work better than the old SIRI for finding technical information. Now I get answers instead of references to web pages. It is a bit slow, but I think this will get better with time. It’s not perfect at doing things on the iPhone, but much better than before.
Here is a truly disheartening fact about the limits of Apple AI: Forget about using AI to answer queries or do any work on files in your iCloud – it’s impossible. Only the drive on your actual Mac is indexed. If you want to have those files ion iCloud ndexed, you have to turn off Optimize Storage in settings – and pray you have enough space on your drive!! I am so frustrated by this – it’s a big impediment to my work.