Apple's revamped agentic Siri arrives in iOS 27 developer beta

Apple's long-awaited revamped Siri, first shown at WWDC 2026, is now available to test in the iOS 27 developer beta. The new agentic Siri can draft text messages in a user's own voice and reportedly outperforms the old Siri notably on Apple Watch, addressing years of criticism over Siri's stagnation. A macOS 27 beta was found to hide a 'Voice Pad' interface offering 13 voices.

The redesign draws on on-device personal-data access for personalization, which privacy-focused developers welcomed — though some worried about the reported Gemini backbone powering always-on search, and enthusiasm was tempered by an iPhone 15 Pro+ hardware requirement and an EU delay. Separately, Apple Intelligence was cleared for launch in China using Alibaba Qwen and Baidu models, a regulatory-driven multi-provider arrangement.

The launch matters because Siri has been Apple's most visible AI weakness; the delayed rollout was the subject of a false-advertising lawsuit (settled separately this week). Competitively, Apple is arriving late to agentic assistants already shipping from Google, Samsung, Meta, and OpenAI, and its dependence on Gemini for search underscores how far behind Apple's own models remain.

Skeptics note this is still a developer beta, not a public release, and Apple's history of feature-delivery slippage looms large. Watch the public beta timing, the EU availability question, and whether on-device personalization delivers without the privacy tradeoffs of a Gemini backbone.