Apple's Rebuilt Siri Is in Public Beta. It Runs on Google's Gemini, and App Intents Is How Your App Plugs In.

TL;DR

On July 13, 2026, Apple shipped the iOS 27 public beta, and with it the first chance for regular users to try the completely rebuilt Siri: an assistant that holds a real conversation, reads what is on your screen, and takes actions across your apps. The part Apple would rather you not dwell on is that the brain is not Apple's. Per reporting from Bloomberg, the new Siri runs on a custom Google Gemini model. And if you build apps, the story that matters is quieter still: App Intents, not SiriKit, is now the only door into it, and it is gated behind a waitlist.

What actually shipped

The public beta landed for iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, watchOS 27, and tvOS 27. The headline feature is Siri. The old Siri was a command parser wearing a personality: say the magic phrase, get the one canned action. The new Siri is a large language model with hands. It can carry an ongoing conversation, search your personal context (your mail, messages, files), answer questions about what is on the screen right now, and chain actions across multiple apps in a single request.

Responses surface from the Dynamic Island, and there is a standalone Siri app that keeps your conversation history in sync. That last detail is the tell: Apple now treats Siri as a chatbot you visit, not just a voice you summon.

Two caveats before you get excited. First, it is waitlist-gated even in the beta: install iOS 27, open Settings, go to the Siri menu, and tap Join Waitlist. Second, the hardware bar is real. iOS 27 installs on the iPhone 11 and up, but the new Siri needs an Apple Intelligence device (iPhone 15 Pro or newer), and a handful of features want an iPhone 17 Pro or iPhone Air.

The plot twist: Apple's assistant runs on Google

Here is the reversal. According to MacRumors and Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple signed a multi-year deal with Google, reported at roughly one billion dollars per year, to run a custom Gemini-based model as the cloud brain behind Siri and Apple Intelligence. Bloomberg pegged that custom model at around 1.2 trillion parameters. Apple's marketing will keep saying "Siri" and "Apple Intelligence"; the model doing the heavy lifting is Google's. The company that spent a decade insisting Siri was proudly homegrown just quietly rented its cortex from its biggest search rival.

You are not locked to it. iOS 27 lets users pick an alternative provider through Apple's "Extensions" mechanism, so ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini can field requests, each with a different voice so you can hear which one answered. But the default is the Gemini-based brain, and defaults are destiny.

Why should you care which model is underneath? Because behavior, refusals, latency, and context limits now depend on a model Apple does not fully control, and one that could be swapped in a future negotiation. If you build on top of Siri, you are building on a rented foundation.

SiriKit is out. App Intents is the contract now.

This is the sentence to internalize: the way an app talks to Siri has changed. The old world was SiriKit, a short list of fixed domains (messaging, payments, workouts) that Apple defined and you filled in. If your app did not fit a domain, Siri could not touch it. Pour one out for SiriKit.

The new world is App Intents. In Apple's own words from its developer announcement: "Updates to the App Intents framework enable developers to connect their apps to Siri AI capabilities like personal context understanding, app actions, and onscreen awareness." Translation: you expose your app's entities and actions as intents, and Siri can reason over them, reference what is on screen, and invoke them, without you scripting a single canned phrase.

The onscreen-awareness piece is the genuinely hard part, so here is the picture. A new View Annotations API lets you map your on-screen views to structured entities, so when a user says "play the third one" or "reply to that," Siri resolves the reference to a real object in your UI. (It is the difference between a shop assistant who needs the exact product code and one who is standing at the shelf with you and just gets "that one, no, the blue one next to it.")

The practical upshot: your app's content becomes discoverable across the whole system through Siri, Spotlight, and Shortcuts from one integration, and there is a new App Intents testing framework to validate it through real system paths instead of brittle UI automation. If you have been shipping SiriKit intents, that investment is now legacy. If you never touched Siri because SiriKit was too rigid, this is the moment to look again.

The other framework you should not confuse it with

Do not mix up the Gemini-based Siri brain with the model you get as a developer. They are two different things. Siri's cloud reasoning is the Google deal; the on-device model you can call yourself is Apple's, through the Foundation Models framework. Apple now describes it as "a single native Swift API" that supports more powerful on-device models with image input, optional server models, and custom skills.

The sleeper detail: developers in the App Store Small Business Program can hit the next generation of Apple foundation models on Private Cloud Compute at no cloud API cost. That is a quietly aggressive shot at the whole business of paying a third party per token, and worth a look if your app's AI bill is starting to sting.

What you should actually do

If you ship an iOS app: audit your App Intents coverage now, add View Annotations for your primary screens, and get on the beta so you can test against the waitlisted Siri before September's stable release lands with the new iPhones. If you are model-agnostic, note that the assistant your users talk to is now Gemini-shaped by default, so test your prompts and expectations against that, not against last year's Siri. And if you assumed Siri was an Apple-only stack, update the mental model: it is an Apple interface over a Google engine, with a developer contract that finally treats your app as a first-class citizen.

Key Takeaways

• Apple shipped the iOS 27 public beta on July 13, 2026, the first look regular users get at the rebuilt, LLM-grade Siri.
• The new Siri holds conversations, reads your screen, uses personal context, and acts across apps, but it is gated behind a waitlist and needs an Apple Intelligence device (iPhone 15 Pro or newer).
• Per Bloomberg and MacRumors, Siri's cloud brain is a custom Google Gemini model (reported near 1.2 trillion parameters, roughly one billion dollars per year), with ChatGPT and Claude selectable as alternatives.
• SiriKit is effectively retired. App Intents is now how apps connect to Siri, including onscreen awareness through the new View Annotations API.
• The developer-facing Foundation Models framework (Apple's own on-device and Private Cloud Compute models) is separate from the Gemini-based Siri, with free foundation-model access for Small Business Program members.
• Stable iOS 27 arrives in September 2026 with new iPhones; the developer beta opened June 8, the public beta July 13.

Sources: MacRumors, 9to5Mac, Apple Newsroom, MacRumors (third-party models), Bloomberg, Forbes