The New Siri: What It Can Do, What’s Still Coming, and the Limits Europe Faces

On September 14, 2026, Apple finally shipped the long-awaited, fully overhauled Siri with iOS 27, iPadOS 27 and macOS 27: a language-model-based assistant that converses, reasons, and takes action on your behalf instead of just executing fixed commands. It’s the culmination of a project Apple announced back in June 2024, one that was repeatedly delayed by quality problems and an internal change of direction.

This whitepaper lays out what the new Siri can actually do today, how Apple partners with Google (Gemini) under the hood to make it possible, which products and features are still in the pipeline, and, relevant to anyone doing business in Europe, why users here will have to settle for less than users in the United States and the United Kingdom for the time being.

From fixed commands to a language model

The ‘old’ Siri worked with a fixed set of commands: it recognised keywords and carried out a matching action. If your request didn’t fit that rigid pattern, Siri simply gave up. The new Siri has been rebuilt around a large language model (LLM), comparable to the technology behind ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, so it can now handle loose phrasing, follow-up questions and vaguely worded requests.

One striking detail: for part of the language processing behind this new Siri, Apple leans on technology from a competitor. Early 2026 it was confirmed that Apple had signed a multi-year agreement with Google, reportedly worth around $1 billion a year, under which Google’s Gemini model runs on Apple’s own servers (Private Cloud Compute). Google gets no access to user data in the process: processing happens entirely within Apple’s infrastructure and under Apple’s own privacy rules. For simpler, on-device tasks, Apple continues to rely on its own, smaller Apple Intelligence models.

What the new Siri can already do

With the release of iOS 27, four core capabilities have been added that together largely deliver on the 2024 promise:

• Personal context: with permission, Siri can look across your email, messages, files, photos, calendar and contacts to answer questions that were previously impossible, such as ‘when does my mother’s flight land?’ or ‘send me the invoice I got from the plumber last week’.
• Onscreen awareness: Siri sees what’s on your screen and can act on it: adding an address from a text message straight to a contact card, or sending a photo you’re currently viewing, without you having to explain which photo you mean.
• Action-oriented, cross-app work: through the expanded App Intents framework, Siri can carry out tasks that span multiple apps, such as moving a file, editing a photo and sending it right away, or scheduling an appointment based on a conversation in Messages.
• Broader world knowledge: thanks to integrated web search, Siri now also answers general questions, from recipes to homework help, instead of simply redirecting you to a search engine.

On top of that comes a new interface layer: Spotlight has been replaced by a ‘Search or Ask’ interface you open with a swipe down from the Dynamic Island, answers appear as expandable text bubbles with a ‘+’ button for attaching files, and there’s now a standalone Siri app for reviewing earlier conversations. On the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air, you can even fine-tune Siri’s voice yourself: pace and expressiveness are adjustable.

A project with a long runway

The road to this release was anything but straight. Apple announced the revamped Siri in June 2024 as part of Apple Intelligence, with a release planned for late 2024 or early 2025. Internally, however, the chosen hybrid approach, combining two separate systems, failed to meet Apple’s own quality bar: test builds failed a large share of the time. That triggered a full restart around a pure LLM architecture, a change at the top of the Siri organisation (Mike Rockwell took over from John Giannandrea), and a string of new deadlines that fell one after another: first iOS 18, then iOS 26.4, then iOS 26.5, and finally iOS 27 in September 2026.

What’s still coming

Apple is positioning iOS 27 explicitly as a starting point, not a finish line. A number of developments we can expect over the coming period:

• More languages: the new Siri launches in English (United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Ireland, India, New Zealand and South Africa). Apple has promised additional languages “soon,” without a firm date: given the track record of previous Apple Intelligence rollouts, some scepticism about the definition of “soon” seems warranted.
• New hardware built around Siri: according to reporting by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, a refreshed HomePod, an Apple TV 4K with a dedicated N1 chip for Apple Intelligence, and an entirely new smart-home hub (a square, 7-inch display for controlling smart-home devices) are reportedly already finished in the lab. Apple is said to have deliberately delayed their launch until the new Siri was stable enough to serve as their control layer.
• A health assistant: as part of the announced Health+ service, Apple is working on an AI agent that offers health guidance based on your Apple Watch and Health data, likely as a paid subscription.
• Deeper app actions: developers are getting ever more ways to expose their own app’s functionality to Siri through App Intents, which should further increase its usefulness for business workflows over time.

The limits Europe faces

For the European market, and therefore for most Woodapplez readers, there’s one significant caveat: at the launch of iOS 27 and iPadOS 27, the new Siri is not available on iPhone, iPad or Apple Watch within the European Union. Apple points to the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the EU law that requires large platforms to open up their services to competitors.

Apple’s reasoning, as laid out in an official statement, is essentially that the DMA would require Apple to give competing, third-party virtual assistants “nearly unlimited access” to a device, including the ability to act autonomously without the user’s ongoing visibility and control. According to Apple, that creates a real security risk: unauthorised access to messages, purchases, files and account settings.

“Their refusal to engage constructively on solutions that preserve privacy and security means we do not currently have a timeline.”
— Craig Federighi, Senior VP Software Engineering, Apple

Apple says it proposed a compromise in the form of a “Trusted System Agent”: an intermediary layer that would give third-party assistants controlled, limited access without the full system access the DMA appears to require, rolled out over an 18-month period. The European Commission reportedly rejected that proposal, after which Apple decided not to launch the feature in the EU at all for now.

The result is a fairly patchy availability landscape:

Availability of the new Siri by platform, as of the iOS 27 launch (September 14, 2026).

In other words: a European business user with a Mac or Vision Pro can, once English is supported, actually use the new Siri, while the very same feature is simply missing on their iPhone and iPad. For a company that markets “privacy and security” as a core value, that’s an awkward message to send to the European market.

This state of affairs is not uncontested, not even among critics of Apple’s market power. Dirk Auer of the International Center for Law & Economics points out that the effect of the DMA here seems to backfire: rather than boosting competition among AI assistants for European consumers, the regulation in this case causes one provider to simply withdraw, which actually narrows consumer choice. His key point: “removing a competitor from the market is the opposite of contestability.”

It’s worth holding two things at once here. On one hand, this is Apple’s own reading of its DMA obligations, and it’s up to the European Commission, and ultimately the courts, to decide whether that reading holds up: regulators may interpret the interoperability requirements differently than Apple does, and part of the dispute is visibly also a negotiating tactic. On the other hand, the effect on end users in Europe is, for now, not in dispute: no date, no new Siri on iPhone or iPad, and currently no sign of that changing.

For continental European users there’s a second, more practical limitation on top of the EU block: even setting the regulatory issue aside, the new Siri launches in English only. Apple Intelligence has been rolling out gradually in additional European languages for its existing features since late 2025, but for the fully overhauled, LLM-driven Siri, no local-language release date has been announced yet. Businesses operating outside the English-speaking world may therefore be waiting on both a regulatory and a linguistic catch-up.

Conclusion

More than two years after it was first announced, the new Siri is finally a reality: an assistant that understands what’s happening on your screen, that can consult your personal data (with permission) to give useful answers, and that can carry out tasks across apps on its own, powered by a combination of Apple’s own models and Google’s Gemini technology. The announced next steps, from new smart-home hardware to a health assistant, show that Apple wants Siri to grow into the control layer for its entire ecosystem.

For European business users, however, the message for now is: patience. As long as Apple and the European Commission fail to agree on how the DMA applies to an AI assistant with far-reaching system access, the new Siri will remain out of reach on the most widely used devices, the iPhone and the iPad. Woodapplez will keep following this story and will report immediately once there’s news of a European release.

Sources

1. MacRumors — LLM Siri: The Complete Guide to Apple’s AI Assistant Overhaul
2. MacRumors — iOS 27: Everything We Know
3. MacRumors — New Siri Features Absent From iOS 26.5 Beta, Likely Pushed to iOS 27
4. MacRumors — Google Confirms Gemini-Powered Siri Coming Later This Year
5. Apple Newsroom — Due to the DMA, Siri AI is delayed in the EU for iOS 27 and iPadOS 27
6. AppleInsider — Google confirms context-aware Siri built from Gemini will debut in 2026
7. International Center for Law & Economics — Apple’s EU Siri AI Delay Shows DMA Reducing Competition, Auer Says
8. iCulture — Maak (opnieuw) kennis met de nieuwe Siri
9. AppleTips.nl — Apple Intelligence-functies voor Siri worden in zomer/najaar 2026 verwacht
10. AIWereld.nl — Apple Intelligence in Nederland: beschikbaarheid en EU-beperkingen
11. Macworld — Internal Apple code hints improved Siri will land with ‘HomePad’ hub
12. iCreate Magazine — Deze 3 nieuwe Apple-producten zijn vertraagd dankzij Siri
13. GSMArena — Here are the three major new AI features coming in iOS 27
14. Forbes — Apple’s New Siri Can Take Actions Across Apps