Overview: These new AI features could come with iOS 26 (and 27)

Apple and AI – so far, not a great match. Apple Intelligence is considered inferior to ChatGPT, Claude, and even Copilot, and Alexa has now surpassed Siri thanks to generative AI. However, in the coming months, with Google's help, a lot is expected to happen: Apple plans to finally implement features announced the year before last and, at least according to rumors, finally launch its own chatbot. An overview of the features that could soon be coming in terms of Apple AI.

First, iOS 26.4

The first innovations will come with iOS 26.4, which will be released at the end of March to the beginning of April. Before that, however, iOS 26.3 is due, which will likely arrive in February with some bug fixes and new ways to transfer data to and from Android devices. iOS 26.4 is expected to enable the long-announced Siri improvements. These will likely be testable as a beta for the first time in February and will come with the ability to read personal data from the device and work with it (context-sensitive Siri), recognize screen content (to interact directly with apps), and new ways to control iOS programs, provided developers implement the corresponding App Intent interface. All functions will be available from the iPhone 15 Pro and have been postponed several times, originally announced for summer 2024.

It is unclear whether Apple will implement context-sensitive Siri with Google's Gemini or use its own language models – in October, there were reportedly internal concerns about their capabilities. In principle: Although Apple uses Google's Gemini in its current generation with finetuning for a fee, Google itself is said to not receive any data – instead, the software runs in Apple's own (or at least self-rented and controlled) cloud infrastructure. The company will likely not explicitly point out that it uses Google technology, even if this has been publicly acknowledged.

The real start is only from autumn

However, things will get really exciting later regarding Apple Intelligence and Siri. The also planned chatbot function will not be released to customers as part of iOS 26, but only with iOS 27 (as well as iPadOS 27 and macOS 27), which will be released in autumn 2026. According to current reports, Apple plans a major "reveal" at its WWDC 2026 developer conference in the summer: The voice assistant, available since 2011, is finally expected to become conversational. As accustomed from voice mode applications on ChatGPT and in the Gemini app, you will be able to chat with Siri, it will remember conversations and act as an assistant. Siri is expected to answer knowledge questions (without just providing web links) and – if possible – also provide emotional support. All of this would be largely new for Apple's technology. This also applies to deep AI integration into Apple's own apps, which is also planned.

Agentic capabilities such as accessing web services, booking trips, and more are also conceivable – whether Apple will actually implement this given technical concerns and data protection issues remains to be seen. Apple briefly considered developing its own chatbot app, but the company prefers system-wide integrations. The current technical basis is Gemini 3, with which the system is said to be able to keep up according to a Bloomberg report from Sunday, and overall, the new Siri is said to be "significantly more capable" than the old one.

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