Is Siri Taking Over the Camera? iOS 27 Rumors Point to a Major AI Rebrand
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It’s the time of year again when rumors about Apple’s next big iPhone software update begin to pile up, and it looks like Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman is on a particular roll this week.
Since Apple is expected to unveil iOS 27 at its 2026 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) keynote in just over six weeks, it’s not surprising that we’re seeing more information leak out on what to expect. After all, there are probably already final alpha or early beta versions running on Apple employee devices. However, Gurman seems to have come up with two new photography-related rumors in less than 24 hours.
Yesterday, Gurman shared how the Photos app will gain new generative AI editing features to extend, enhance, and reframe photos. Now, he’s following that up with what Apple has in store for the other side of its photographic coin: the Camera app that actually brings images into the Photos app in the first place.
While the new AI editing features in Photos sound like the same sort of thing that Google has been doing in its own Google Photos app for years, Apple’s plans to tie AI “more deeply” into the Camera app could present an entirely new approach to mobile photography and — perhaps even more importantly — Apple’s visual intelligence features.
Apple introduced visual intelligence two years ago with the debut of the iPhone 16. While it was ostensibly part of Apple Intelligence, it remained exclusive to Apple’s 2024 iPhone lineup for several months, due to Apple’s insistence on tying it to the new Camera Control — a button lacking on the iPhone 15 Pro. However, when the iPhone 16e showed up with Apple Intelligence sans Camera Control, Apple was forced to provide other ways to trigger visual intelligence, at which point it made sense to extend it back to the iPhone 15 Pro in iOS 18.4.
That meant adding visual intelligence triggers to the Action button and Control Center. However, Gurman’s sources say Apple plans to take that a step further in iOS 27 by baking it right into the Camera app — and branding it as a “Siri” feature.
The feature — now branded with the Siri name — will appear as a new toggle option alongside Photo, Video, Portrait and other existing choices, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans haven’t been announced.
Mark Gurman
“That will make it more prominent within the iPhone interface,” Gurman says, implying that perhaps Apple was concerned that not enough people used the feature or even knew about it.
Is Visual Intelligence Growing Up?
While visual intelligence was a new way of leveraging AI in iOS 18.2, the feature’s roots actually run much deeper, harkening back to 2021 when Apple introduced Visual Look Up in iOS 15.
That initial version of Visual Look Up allowed your iPhone to identify popular art, landmarks, plans, flowers, and pets (mostly cats and dogs) from photos in your library. Apple later expanded it in iOS 17 to also include laundry symbols, car dashboard alerts and even recipes from food items.
Those features predate Apple Intelligence, which means they can be used on nearly any iPhone that supports those iOS versions. It also goes to show how deeply AI features have been baked into Apple’s products for years — they just didn’t have the fancy “AI” buzzword to describe them.
Visual intelligence was simply a natural evolution of Visual Look Up, but there’s also an interesting nuance to how Apple has handled these features. While Visual Look Up is a “branded” feature, with its name rendered in title case, “visual intelligence” is not. That may not seem like a big deal at first glance, but Apple is a company that sweats these kinds of details, which leaves little doubt this was a deliberate decision.
It’s even unique among other Apple Intelligence features. Writing Tools, Image Playground, Image Wand, and Genmoji all get expressed as proper nouns. Visual intelligence is the outlier here, sharing lowercase only with notification summaries and reduce interruptions, both of which feel more like feature descriptions than names.
While it’s difficult to imagine what Apple was thinking here, there’s no way it was simply an oversight. However, Gurman’s latest report may give us a hint in the prediction that Apple will turn visual intelligence into a Siri feature.
Sources indicate that Apple is preparing to release a standalone Siri app in iOS 27. Code-named “Campo,” it’s believed to provide a chatbot interface similar in style to the Messages app — and it will undoubtedly work much like ChatGPT and Gemini already do.
If that’s the case, then “visual intelligence” starts to become a somewhat redundant name. Neither OpenAI nor Google “brand” the ability for their chatbot apps to analyze photos. It’s just something they do among their many other features. Presumably, feeding a photo into the “Campo” Siri app will work the same way, except that Apple also has a plethora of other iPhone apps that it can tie into as well.
For now, at least, Gurman says the new mode “will let users point the camera at an object and tap into services such as ChatGPT to ask questions about the object or scene” or run Google reverse image search to pull up more information. That’s already what visual intelligence does, but if Apple truly plans to rebrand this as a Siri feature, I doubt that’s the end-game — and it could even be gone by the time this change ships in iOS 27-dot-whatever.
My guess is that what we’ll actually be looking at here is a button in the Camera app not to analyze an image using “visual intelligence,” but to send it to “Siri” for analysis, just like you can take a photo in ChatGPT or Gemini. After all, if Siri is to become a full chatbot with a standalone app, it would be very odd to send photos to ChatGPT instead. Some reports do suggest Apple isn’t eliminating its Apple Intelligence “extensions” right away, which means ChatGPT may still be in the mix, but it’s almost certain to take a back seat to the new Siri experience.
Gurman adds that Apple is also “redesigning the [Camera] experience with a new shutter button styled after the Apple Intelligence logo,” and modifying the Camera Control visual intelligence shortcut to launch the Camera app in that mode instead of the built-in interface that’s used in iOS 26. He also confirms earlier reports that the feature will be able to analyze new types of data, including scanning nutrition labels on food packaging to log dietary information — presumably to the Health app.
[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.]
