Parents want one thing, and one thing only, from AI: adding a list of soccer games or “spirit week” themed days from an email or poorly formatted brochure to their calendar in one fell swoop. And I have good news for iPhone parents: the new Siri can finally do this.
After stumbling with the first release of an AI-enabled Siri, Apple is trying again. The newly improved Siri AI can chat with you about what might be killing the roses in your garden, make a shopping list for the hardware store, and set a reminder to put some compost in that flower bed. You can check information in your email and calendar to make recommendations or provide a really helpful answer to the question, “When should I leave for the airport?” And yes, you can even add an event list from an email to your calendar. I tried all of these scenarios myself and saw how it happened. AI Siri is real this time.
But it’s also a pretty basic feature set for an AI assistant in 2026, especially when you compare it to what Gemini has been doing on Android for the past few years. Google’s chatbot has been able to add multiple calendar events from a screenshot for at least a year at this point. You’ve been diagnosing plant problems and scheduling maintenance reminders for months, if not longer. The new Siri is based on Gemini models, so it makes a lot of sense that the first version of Siri AI feels a little “Gemini, circa 2025.”
However, Siri AI has its own flavor. Apple has lots of proprietary stuff happening under the hood and in the cloud. It is based on a set of device data obtained from things like emails and messages. This information is indexed so Siri can access the relevant bits when needed. Prompts that cannot be fully handled on the device are sent to Apple’s Private Cloud Computing with only the relevant personal data attached. Gemini handles personal context differently; you choose to share your Gmail or calendar, and then you’ll go directly to those sources for information when needed.
How well Siri AI works depends largely on the context of understanding the AI. So far, he’s doing pretty well. I asked him when I needed to return some camera equipment I rented for WWDC and he found the information for a calendar event I had done and in an email (will need to come back on Friday, for the record). Likewise, if you ask it to do something like “add these events to my calendar”, it will constantly make you reference the information on my screen. So far, so good.
I couldn’t get Siri to do any mischief; I didn’t exactly stress test it, but the railings were strong enough to return a curt “I can’t help you with that” to a shady message. Fair. As a conversationalist, the new Siri also seems a little more dispassionate than Gemini. I gave them both the same message asking why the flowers in front of my house seemed to be wilting. They both gave detailed answers with many possible causes, but Gemini started with “That’s incredibly frustrating…” where Siri was more direct and began diagnosing the situation.
The new Siri also handled my tracking requests well. I asked him to recommend a garden center “close to home” and he gave me a good suggestion. It also created a new reminder list with some checklist items for my yard rehab project and added a calendar event, all from a single message. Pretty basic stuff, but this is Siri. The fact that it works is a step forward that has been years in the making.
The new Siri appears in many places on the iPhone. I’ve gotten used to swiping down on the home screen and using search to access apps, and every time I do that a big “search or ask” message pops up with a bright, blinking cursor. Long pressing the wake button now also summons Siri from the Dynamic Island, rather than presenting it as a glowing border around the screen. All the changes add up to a subtle feeling that you’re never far from Siri.
All the changes add up to a subtle feeling that you’re never far from Siri.
This version of Siri feels like the AI assistant you’d build if you knew you couldn’t screw it up. It supports a pretty basic feature set (there’s no DoorDashing your burritos for you here), but it actually does what it’s advertised to do. For the company that made big promises about Siri two years ago that never materialized, that’s a big problem. “It works” and “It will actually ship to customers” are the two goals that Apple couldn’t miss here. It’s only in a developer beta now, but it’s more real than the first AI Siri they showed us at WWDC. Apple needs this version of Siri to regain trust. And based on what I’ve seen so far, this seems like a small step toward regaining that trust.
Photography by Allison Johnson/The Verge
