Apple is opening its new Siri AI to everyone with the iOS 27 public beta

Apple is opening Siri’s wider audience to viewers with the release of the public beta of iOS 27, giving everyday users a chance to try out the new AI assistant before a wider launch later this fall.

The public beta marks the first time that Apple has made its AI-powered Siri widely available outside of developers. With about 2.5 billion active devices worldwide, even if only a fraction of users enter the public beta, it will still represent the biggest test of Apple’s redesigned AI assistant and its response to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and others.

The Siri AI update, which was officially announced at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June, transforms Apple’s aging voice assistant into a powerful, AI-powered tool that can find information on a user’s device, including emails, photos, and messages, and respond to what’s on the screen and focus its responses on world information, similar to any AI chatbo today.

It is also very deeply integrated into the entire operating system. It can be accessed by saying “Hey Siri” or by pressing the side button, as before, and by swiping down from the Dynamic Island (the black bar at the top of the screen). Plus, it’s integrated with the iPhone’s built-in search engine tool, Spotlight, making it even more powerful than before because it can search for answers to almost any question.

For the first time, Siri has also been given its own standalone app, a user experience that people who are already comfortable with chatbots like ChatGPT or Gemini will love. However, because Siri is so deeply integrated into every iPhone, accessing it through an app seems unnecessary.

In addition to iOS 27 on iPhone, improved Siri is available on all other Apple products, including iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, CarPlay, AirPods, Apple TV, and Vision Pro.

Under the hood, Siri AI uses Apple Intelligence, including Apple’s new base models that run on the device and use Private Cloud Compute. Apple created its Foundation Models in collaboration with Google and its Gemini model, but these models are not just some rebranded Gemini model. Instead, Apple’s models are designed specifically for its Apple Silicon using proprietary data, and it breaks down Google’s Gemini – a process that uses Gemini to create smaller, more efficient models built into iOS and other Apple software. Meanwhile, Private Cloud Compute ensures that users’ personal data is not stored or accessed by Apple.

In early testing of the developer version of Siri AI, the assistant was able to better handle basic tasks on the phone, such as finding specific photos in the Photo Library, summarizing group texts, adding a text-sent appointment to your calendar, and checking nutritional information about what’s in your camera’s view. It was also better for answering questions that usually require you to search the web to answer them, such as when there is an upcoming local event, or what’s happening in the news.

In the developer beta, Siri would sometimes throw error messages or get confused. (For example, I once asked Siri about the latest news about Iran, and it searched my contacts to find someone with that name.)

However, it’s easy to see Siri becoming a bigger part of your everyday digital life, especially since it doesn’t require you to open an app to use it.

Overall, the developer betas this year have been stable, making it very easy to recommend the public beta at this time. Of course, installing a beta should always be approached with caution; if your device should work fine and never encounter errors, you may want to hold it until the public launch of iOS 27, which is expected in September.