Apple Unveils Rebuilt 'Siri AI' at WWDC in Tim Cook's Farewell Keynote

Apple used the keynote of its Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday in Cupertino, California, to introduce a ground-up overhaul of Siri — rebranded "Siri AI" — in a bid to close the gap with rivals such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini after a troubled first attempt at artificial intelligence. The event doubled as a milestone: it was the last WWDC keynote for Chief Executive Tim Cook, who is set to hand the company to operations chief John Ternus in September.

Apple said it had rebuilt Siri from the ground up with AI at its core. The new assistant can hold multi-turn conversations, draw on a user's personal context across messages, emails and photos, and act on what is shown on a device's screen. It will live in a dedicated, chatbot-style app — in addition to working across existing apps — where users can ask questions, generate text and images, and analyze files, then pull down a tab to type follow-ups. Apple is powering the system in part with Google's Gemini models under a partnership the companies announced earlier this year.

The company leaned on privacy as its differentiator. It showed a Passwords app that uses Apple Intelligence and Safari to "agentically take action on your behalf," visiting individual websites to change insecure passwords, and a new "Siri mode" for the iPhone camera that can, for example, estimate the nutritional information of a plate of food when a user taps the shutter. Siri AI is being built to run across iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV and the Vision Pro headset, with more natural, adjustable voices.

Apple also detailed infrastructure behind the push. Its Apple Foundation Models include an AFM Cloud Pro tier for demanding tasks that runs on Nvidia GPUs in Google's cloud, and Xcode 27 will fold coding agents from Anthropic, Google and OpenAI into the developer workflow. Alongside Siri, the company previewed iOS 27, a refreshed "Liquid Glass" design language and updates across its operating systems.

There were limits. Apple said Siri AI would arrive first for U.S. customers in English later this year — in developer beta starting Monday, a public beta in July and a full release in September alongside the expected iPhone 18 — and would not be immediately available in the European Union or China because of regulatory hurdles. Cook closed the keynote with a personal farewell, telling the audience, "I truly believe that the best is still ahead, and Apple is creating the best products in the world to deliver experiences that enrich people's lives." For a company that stumbled badly on its first AI rollout, the keynote was a high-stakes attempt at redemption — and a changing of the guard.