Siri’s Big Do-Over: What to Expect from iOS 27 and WWDC26

Apple’s 2026 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is only seven weeks away, so the time is about right for us to start hearing some leaks about what we can expect from iOS 27 — the next major release of Apple’s iPhone software that’s expected to be unveiled during the WWDC Keynote on June 8.

It’s been widely assumed for a while that Apple will use WWDC26 to show off a sort of “Apple Intelligence Redux,” perhaps offering a more grounded version of the AI dog and pony show it gave us at WWDC24 nearly two years ago.

Back then, it unveiled Apple Intelligence with some bold promises, and while it easily fulfilled some of those, such as Writing Tools and Image Playground, we’re still waiting on what was perhaps the most significant part of Apple’s AI ambitions: a smarter and more personally-aware Siri.

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While that was expected to take a while from the start, Apple conspicuously missed an anticipated iOS 18.4 debut in early 2025, candidly admitting that it needed more time to get it right, and that it would be coming sometime in 2026. Sadly, the hopes that this would happen in iOS 26.4 were also dashed last month when it became apparent that “Siri 2.0” still wasn’t ready for prime time.

The consensus among insiders is that Apple now plans to hold off Siri 2.0 until iOS 27, where the promised 2024 improvements could also be delivered alongside a full Siri Chatbot with a standalone app in the style of ChatGPT or Gemini.

If that’s the case, Apple is going to have some pretty exciting stuff to show us at WWDC26, and Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman believes the WWDC teaser is explicitly pointing to the new Siri user interface.

Apple’s penchant for putting subtle hints in its event announcements and invites is well-known among fans and industry watchers, and WWDC26 is unlikely to be an exception. In this week’s Power On newsletter, Gurman points to previous examples in both phrasing and graphic design, from 2020’s “Hi, Speed” Event — and not-unsubtle nod to the 5G iPhone 12 — to last year’s “Awe Dropping” Event that featured a thermal-camera style logo that clearly pointed to the iPhone 17 Pro vapor chamber.

Similarly, the WWDC24 and WWDC25 logos contained hints of the new glowing Siri AI interface of iOS 18 and the Liquid Glass design of iOS 26, respectively. So, it shouldn’t come as much surprise that the glowing “26” in the WWDC26 logo also means something, but while we often only understand these veiled references in retrospect, Gurman has some advance insight into what this latest one means — and in a repeat of 2024, it appears to be a direct pointer to another redesign of the Siri interface.

Gurman remains confident that Apple will have its new “Campos” Siri chatbot ready to show off at WWDC26, including the standalone app with an ability to handle multiple commands in a single query, support third-party AI agents, and — finally — use contextual data from apps like Mail and Calendar along with on-screen content to fulfill queries.

While everything else is kind of a bonus — even if Apple is late to the game — that last part is what the company promised us at WWDC24. After so many false starts, dare we hope it’s actually coming this time?

Is Siri Back on Track?

There’s good reason to believe Apple has finally figured this out. The initial attempt to smarten up Siri was, to put it bluntly, a train wreck. Gurman and others reported that what Apple actually showed off at WWDC24 was a “barely functional prototype” that it genuinely believed it could polish up and get ready in time. Sadly, it was wrong, and was forced to make some very significant structural changes to get things back on track, not the least of which was the shuttering of its independent machine learning and AI strategy division and the uniquely messy departure of a senior vice president.

Since then, Apple has been forced to admit it needed outside help. In January, Apple and Google signed a landmark partnership to use the Gemini models as the basis for the new Siri and other Apple Intelligence features. To be clear, this does not mean that Apple is simply putting Gemini on the iPhone; rather, it’s using Google’s models as the foundation from which it will build its own.

That all makes it far more likely Apple will indeed have something legit to show us in June. It may not be ready for final release, but Apple wouldn’t dare make the same mistake twice, and if a next-generation Siri takes the stage at this year’s WWDC, you can bet the company is now supremely confident it will be able to deliver it in iOS 27. Maybe not iOS 27.0, but at least sometime before iOS 28 shows up.

There’s More than Just Siri…

While Gurman focused solely on the Siri improvements, other reports over the past few days have pointed to more new Apple Intelligence features that Apple may be showing off in iOS 27.

Unsurprisingly, most of these are rumored to centre on visual intelligence, as that’s expected to be the core of a whole new lineup of AI hardware accessories, from smart glasses and an AI pendant to camera-equipped AirPods.

Back-end code discovered by Nicolás Alvarez and confirmed by MacRumors reveals four potential new Apple Intelligence features:

1. The ability to scan food nutrition labels with your camera. This may integrate into the Health app and could be a precursor to Apple’s AI-powered Health ambitions. Those have reportedly been scaled back for iOS 27, but that doesn’t mean Apple isn’t still working on them.
2. Similarly, adding camera-scanned phone numbers and addresses directly to Contacts. That’s a feature we’re sort of surprised isn’t there already, considering Apple’s “Data Detectors” have done this for years for digital text, and the company added Calendar support to visual intelligence last year.
3. Generating digital passes in Apple Wallet from real-world items such as event tickets and membership cards. This wouldn’t be simply capturing a picture, but rather using AI features to determine the content of a pass. It remains unclear whether this would be limited to supported types of passes or if it could turn anything with a bar code or QR code into a digital pass.
4. Automatically naming Tab Groups in Safari based on their content to help you keep everything organized. This is the one feature that doesn’t really tie into visual intelligence, but it also goes to show that Apple isn’t ignoring other potential uses of AI.
   

To be clear, these are all very preliminary assumptions based solely on reading code strings, and none of the sources have seen any of these features in operation. Nevertheless, they all sound like the sort of things Apple is likely to be working on, and fit past trends, particularly in the areas of visual intelligence, which is itself an expansion of the Visual Look Up Feature introduced five years ago in iOS 15 for identifying animals, plants, and landmarks, and has since expanded to pets, recipes and even laundry symbols and car dashboard icons.

As in part years, Apple is expected to preview iOS 27 alongside its other “OS 27” platform updates during the WWDC Keynote on June 8, with a first developer preview beta likely launching later that same day. However, there’s no guarantee that all of these new features will be available right away, or even ship in iOS 27.0. Apple has traditionally used WWDC to lay out a roadmap for all the features that are coming over an entire iOS lifecycle, and while it got a bit gushy with iOS 26 last year after the Siri debacle, there’s no reason to believe it won’t return to form this time around.

[The information provided in this article has NOT been confirmed by Apple and may be speculation. Provided details may not be factual. Take all rumors, tech or otherwise, with a grain of salt.]