Apple's rebuilt Siri arrives with iOS 27, reportedly powered by Google Gemini

Apple's public framing centers on capability: the new Siri holds more natural conversations, handles follow-ups, pulls personal context across first-party apps, and answers using web data, headlining a list of 27 new iPhone features shipping with iOS 27. For the first time, Siri also gets a standalone app.

The strategically significant part is the plumbing. Multiple reports say the rebuilt assistant relies on a licensed, customized Google Gemini model for complex tasks, with inference handled on Nvidia chips inside Google's cloud infrastructure — meaning Apple's flagship assistant would run on a competitor's model and a third party's compute. That is a marked departure for a company whose identity is end-to-end control of its stack, and it slots into the week's broader theme of Gemini's enterprise/partner distribution wins.

There is genuine ambiguity in the sources: Apple's own materials attribute the assistant to 'Apple Intelligence,' while third-party reporting emphasizes the Gemini/Nvidia dependency. The most likely reconciliation is a hybrid — on-device Apple Intelligence for private, latency-sensitive tasks and a customized Gemini backend for complex reasoning — but Apple has not publicly confirmed the Gemini arrangement, so readers should treat the specific model partnership as reported rather than official.

Competitively, a Gemini-powered Siri would be a major distribution coup for Google and a tacit admission that Apple's in-house foundation-model efforts lagged. It also deepens Google's assistant footprint just as it pushes Gemini 3.8 Flash and consumer features like Lyria 3.5 music generation. Watch for: privacy framing (how much personal context leaves the device), latency, and whether Apple names the underlying model at launch.