Summary created by Smart Answers AI
In summary:
- Macworld reports that Apple may announce a major Siri overhaul within weeks, featuring Google’s Gemini AI technology through a multi-year partnership.
- Initial Gemini-powered features are expected with iOS 26.4 in March or April, while a fully reimagined Siri codenamed Campos arrives in 2026.
- The upgrade promises conversational abilities and contextual data usage, though running on Google’s cloud infrastructure raises potential privacy concerns.
Earlier this month, Apple and Google issued a joint statement announcing a “multi-year collaboration” to base Siri and other Apple AI products on Google Gemini technology. But more details of the partnership, including the likely timeframe, have now been revealed by a new report.
In the latest edition of his Power On newsletter, Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman claims Apple “appears to be less than a month away from unveiling the results of this partnership.” He isn’t sure if this announcement will take the form of a full press event, acknowledging that the company may choose instead to brief journalists individually, but either way, the information should be out there in a matter of weeks.
According to Gurman, the Siri announcement will mostly consist of what we’ve heard before. Apple will tell us that, finally fulfilling a promise made at WWDC 2024 and later repeatedly delayed, Siri will soon be able to use contextual data–other information on the screen, and everything it knows about the user–to more accurately execute spoken commands. But that’s not all. As we previously reported, the Gemini partnership should bring some new features, including the ability to answer questions conversationally and tell stories, to Apple’s AI products as well.
There will be a gap between the announcement and updated Siri actually rolling out to the public, but it shouldn’t be anything like the delays we’ve seen so far. Gurman expects the new features to be bundled with iOS 26.4, which is currently slated to hit beta testing in February and launch in March or early April.
Beyond April, we can look forward to bigger changes later in the year. Gurman insists that a “fully reimagined” version of Siri, internally codenamed Campos, will be announced at WWDC 2026 and form part of the iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27 updates which roll out to the public in the fall.
“The new system,” Gurman writes, “is a fresh architecture and interface designed from the ground up for the chatbot era.” It will be more conversational than current Siri or even the Siri in iOS 26.4, and capable of “sustained back-and-forth dialogue.” This too will be based on Gemini technology.
But there’s a sting in the tail. While Apple rushed to emphasise that the upcoming Gemini-enhanced version of Siri will run on-device or on Apple’s own servers, implying that this approach was chosen for privacy reasons, Santos may not. According to Gurman’s sources, Apple and Google are currently discussing a plan to have it run on Google’s cloud infrastructure to improve responsiveness. It’s unclear how Apple would square this with its “industry-leading privacy standards,” but it will have plenty of opportunities to make that argument in its various press engagements this year.
