Apple tests major Siri AI upgrade in iOS 27 beta 8 under new CEO Ternus

Apple's iOS 27 beta 8 introduces a substantially rebuilt Siri powered by next-generation Apple Intelligence. The upgrade brings richer answers, more natural conversation, context retention across turns, and cross-app data access that lets Siri pull from messages, emails, photos and notes to answer personal-context queries. Visual Intelligence adds a new Siri mode in the Camera app, extending on-device multimodal understanding.

The capabilities carry hardware and language gates: features require an iPhone 15 Pro or newer and launch with limited language support, reflecting Apple's on-device-first architecture and the compute demands of the new models. This staged rollout is characteristic of Apple's cautious deployment relative to cloud-first rivals.

The timing is notable on two fronts. It coincides with John Ternus's first day as CEO, a leadership transition that puts the long-delayed Siri overhaul under fresh scrutiny after years of Apple lagging on generative AI. And it follows Apple settling a Siri privacy lawsuit for $250 million — a reminder of the trust stakes as Siri gains deeper access to personal data. Competitively, Apple is racing to close the assistant gap with Google's Gemini (which is landing across Pixel and Android) and Samsung's cross-device Samsung Connect vision, while its device-centric, privacy-forward approach remains its core differentiator. The question for developers and users is whether the beta's cross-app intelligence delivers reliably at general availability, given Apple's history of demoing Siri features that slipped in scope and timing.