When Siri finally gets a brain, that brain will mostly be Google's.
For two years, Apple has been promising that Siri would get a brain. The announcement came in June 2024 at the company's developer conference, with demos showing Siri planning lunch around a flight schedule, pulling personal context from across apps, and acting on what was on your screen. It was supposed to ship that year.
It didn't.
In March 2025, Apple delayed the upgrade to "the coming year." Apple settled a $250 million class-action lawsuit from customers who said they bought iPhone 16s based on Siri features that never shipped.
Here is the news that may finally change things. In January 2026, Apple and Google jointly announced a multi-year partnership. The next generation of Siri will not run on Apple's own AI models. It will run on Google's Gemini. Reports peg the deal at around $1 billion a year.
What Siri will eventually do, according to Apple, includes three things current Siri cannot. It will remember the context of past conversations and your personal information across apps. It will understand what is on your screen and take action based on it. And it will perform tasks inside other apps without you switching to them, book a reservation, send a message, find a photo, schedule something, all from a single spoken request.
Apple says some of these features will appear in iOS 26.4 or 26.5 this spring, with the bigger launch at WWDC in June.
Meanwhile, Apple has more than caught up on hardware. The iPhone 17 is a hit.
