Apple has a habit of showing up late to the tech party and still being the best-dressed. It might do it again with the new Siri in iOS 27 this fall.
Right now, Siri is bad — and that's not a harsh take. Ali has ChatGPT pinned to his iPhone's home screen. I have Gemini in a prime spot for quick access to a genuinely useful AI assistant.
These are the habits Apple is up against. But I'm using Gemini less after a few days of test-driving the first iOS 27 beta and years of dunking on Siri. It turns out Siri's new intelligence is based on Gemini models.
One nice update is that Siri AI (as Apple calls it) indexes your phone to capture details from texts, emails, notes, and calendar events. I got answers to queries like "when's my next personal training session?" and "by when do I have to cancel the hotel reservation for a refund?" Siri could fish out the answers to my somewhat vague prompts.
It's convenient to have a dedicated Siri app, too. I find its responses less flattering and more concise than those of other LLMs.
At long last, Siri impressively draws on real-world knowledge. While watching the Knicks parade, I showed Siri a photo and played dumb. It knew exactly what was happening and why. It also gave me helpful commuting tips when I asked, pulling from relevant local news sources.
Siri is not yet excellent. It still sometimes misunderstands my non-American accent (Gemini usually doesn't). And I can't get Siri to answer activity-related questions because it needs access to my Health app (it has access).
This is, of course, a first beta experience. But my hunch is that come this fall, when the masses get access, Siri will be at least better than bad.
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I am a deputy editor of newsletters at Business Insider. In this role, I edit and manage First Trade, a new daily markets newsletter; Tech Memo, Defense Flash, and forthcoming launches.I was previously an investing editor and correspondent, covering actionable advice and markets analysis sourced from Wall Street's most prominent investors. Before that, I focused on BI's real-time markets coverage, including stock moves, analyst commentary, earnings, and economic news.I covered bonds and FX at Bloomberg News before joining BI in 2014.I'm a graduate of Columbia Journalism School (M.S., 2014) and the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.You can connect with me via email, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
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