Also today in Apple Newsroom:

Apple today introduced Siri AI, an entirely new version of Siri, powered by Apple Intelligence. A profoundly more capable and conversational assistant with personal context understanding, broad world knowledge, and onscreen awareness, Siri AI can help users find what they need in the moment, from answering questions from the web on virtually any topic, to surfacing relevant information from a user’s personal messages, emails, photos, and more. Siri AI also includes a dedicated app for users to revisit conversations across their products, an expanded Visual Intelligence experience, and integrated tools for writing. With a bold new architecture uniquely designed to protect users’ privacy, Siri AI leverages the next generation of Apple Intelligence to bring state-of-the-art understanding and reasoning, along with powerful systemwide capabilities, to Apple’s operating systems. These features are available for developer testing starting today, and will be available as a beta to users later this year.

This looks to be most of what Apple promised in 2024, though without any mention of the most ambitious functionality demoed back then (by Kelsey Peterson, who recently left Apple for OpenAI.)

I’m also surprised that Apple rebranded as “Siri AI.” I understand there’s too much brand equity in “Siri” to abandon it completely, yet a strong desire to distinguish it from the embarrassment that is the current version, but tacking on “AI” seems incongruent (and sounds weird when spoken).

This “profoundly more capable” Siri is currently gated behind a “Try New Siri” waitlist in the first beta (under Settings > Siri, not, curiously, “Apple Intelligence and Siri,” as it is in iOS 26). I’ve joined and I’m impatiently awaiting my turn.

(If you’re an iOS or iPadOS user in the European Union, you’ll have to exercise greater patience, because Apple is delaying the launch of Siri AI in the EU because of the Digital Markets Act.)