Apple finally fixed Siri. So why does it feel anticlimactic?
TechCrunch AI Sarah Perez
Siri finally works right in the iOS 27 beta, understanding your stuff and answering real questions. But it took so long that a decent chatbot just feels like Apple caught up, not wowed anyone.
Siri got fixed. That's the headline, and it's not a small thing after years of Apple's assistant mangling basic requests and dodging questions with "here's what I found on the web." In the iOS 27 consumer beta released in July, Siri actually understands context, pulls information off your phone, and holds a real back-and-forth conversation instead of a scripted one.
The features are genuinely solid. Ask Siri to find a receipt without telling it where it's saved, and it finds it. Screenshot a QR code weeks ago and forgot why, and Siri can dig it out. It reads text off a photo of your driver's license, plays the exact song or podcast you asked for on the first try, and now has a standalone app that remembers past conversations. Point your camera at something in the real world and ask what it is, or have it split a dinner bill with friends. None of this is flashy, but all of it is the kind of thing people have wanted Siri to do since roughly 2011.
The engine behind the upgrade is Google's Gemini, which Apple used not as a rebadged bolt-on but as a foundation to train its own Apple Foundation Models, tuned to run on Apple Silicon and through Apple's Private Cloud Compute setup. So this isn't Apple quietly outsourcing Siri to Google and calling it a day — there's real engineering behind making it run locally and privately.
And yet the timing kills the moment. While Apple spent years chasing a working assistant, the rest of the industry moved into agents that complete multi-step tasks, models that write and ship software, and tools that operate your computer for you. Getting Siri to reliably fetch your receipts in 2027 doesn't read as innovation — it reads as Apple finally patching a bug that should have been fixed a decade ago. The public rollout lands with the full iOS 27 release expected in September, and by then this will feel less like an event and more like a correction that was long overdue.
My take
I run open models on my own hardware precisely because I don't want my receipts and driver's license depending on someone else's cloud and someone else's roadmap, so it's a little rich watching Apple bolt Gemini under the hood and call it a private, on-device win. Fixing Siri after fifteen years isn't a comeback story, it's a confession that Apple treated AI as an afterthought while everyone else built the future — and now they're just catching the bus that already left.
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