Apple has released iOS 27, its major update for the iPhone.
The new operating system comes alongside updates for the rest of Apple’s products, from Macs to the Watch and Apple TV.
Almost all of them have one very big feature in common: a new Siri. Apple has entirely rewritten and dramatically improved the voice assistant in its software, and it now offers a whole host of new capabilities.
The new update also brings a range of other features and improvements. Performance is meaningfully improved across the operating systems, for instance, and it brings new child safety protections and tweaks to many of Apple’s apps.
But the updates to Siri are by far the most substantial and obvious changes in the new software. They come after years of promises by Apple that it would add new, useful AI tools to its platforms – and they appear to have finally arrived.
iOS 27 is available for every device that is able to run iOS 26, which means that it is supported all the way back to the iPhone 11 generation. Unusually, some of the changes might be most noticeable on older phones, since they are likely to benefit from the performance improvements.
But some of the updates – most notably the new “Siri AI” require a newer device. They will only work on the iPhone 15 Pro or newer, and the device will also need to be set to English.
Users will also be required to undertake some steps before they can actually get it. First, an iPhone must be updated to the latest software, then users must go through a waitlist to get access to the new tool.
Devices will also have to run a process that allows Siri to gather the information it needs from across the phone. This happens in the background, and can take a long time, but may already have been silently done by a previous update.
Once that is all done, the iPhone will be able to access the new Siri. And it offers a whole range of changes.
They are almost all powered by two changes to Siri: it now relies on advanced artificial intelligence features, and has access to personal data from across the device. That means that users can ask a host of complicated and detailed questions, and have the system pull up information or take actions on their behalf.
Users can ask to see a picture from a specific trip, for instance, or look up information that was shared in Messages even if it is from years ago. Siri can also take actions across apps, sending messages or creating calendar events with natural language, for instance.
