I will say the thing I did not expect to say. After two years of delays and one very public embarrassment, the rebuilt Siri in iOS 27 is the first version in years that feels like it was built on purpose. It is now a real app on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, a back-and-forth thread you can talk or type to, with history that carries from one question to the next. You pull it up, ask, and the answer comes back from the Dynamic Island before the full app even opens.
It holds context, which is the whole game
The thing that won me over is context. Ask a follow-up and it remembers the last thing you said. Point it at something on your screen and it can act on what it sees. Ask it to do a small task and it does it, then shows its work. In the shot below I asked it to make a note, and it created one, titled it, filled it in, and surfaced the result inline, no app switching, no "here is what I found on the web."
It also pulls from your own stuff. When a question touches your calendar, mail, or reminders, the new Siri goes and looks rather than punting to a search. You see it think, a little "looking over results" state, and then it answers using what it actually found on your device. That on-screen, in-your-data awareness is the leap. The old Siri answered the question you asked in isolation. This one answers it in the context of your day.
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Write with Siri, and a real conversation
The other standout is how it writes. Ask it to draft a message or a note and it comes back in something close to your own voice, then lets you nudge the tone. Because the whole thing is a threaded conversation now, you can keep going, refine, ask it to shorten, change one detail, all in the same place, with the history kept for you. It finally behaves like the assistants people have spent two years getting used to elsewhere, except wired into your phone.
The two honest caveats
First, access is gated. Apple put the new Siri behind a waitlist, the same move it pulled when Apple Intelligence first shipped. You update, open Settings, go to the Siri section, and join the waitlist, then wait for the nod. It also needs an Apple Intelligence-capable device, iPhone 15 Pro and newer.
Second, it wears a beta label that is more than a formality. Apple has been calling this version beta and preview internally for months, its quiet way of saying do not expect it fully finished in the fall. And under the hood, as Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has reported, the more ambitious answers lean on a large Google Gemini model that Apple licensed, so not all of this is happening on your phone. (Power On) I dug into what that means for privacy in a separate piece.
The verdict, one week in
Good, with an asterisk, and the asterisk is mostly about polish, not direction. It still trips occasionally, the first beta runs warm, and the waitlist means not everyone can try it on day one. But for the first time in a long time, I am reaching for Siri on purpose instead of out of habit, and it is answering like it was paying attention. That is a sentence I have not been able to write before. If you want the practical version, when to install, what to expect, and how to report the bugs, that is in should you install the iOS 27 beta.
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— JC Mobile App Studio