iOS 27 Is Out With the New Siri, Which Is a Beta, in English Only, Not in the EU, and Only on an iPhone 15 Pro or Newer

The update landed at ten in the morning Pacific time on Monday, which was nine in the evening in the Gulf, and by Tuesday morning most iPhones made since 2019 will have offered it. iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, watchOS 27, tvOS 27 and visionOS 27 all shipped together, according to Apple's release. The headline is the new Siri, which Apple now calls Siri AI, and the first thing to know about it is who does not get it.

The conditions

Siri AI is a beta. It is available in English now, with French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish promised for October. Arabic is not on the list. It is not available in the European Union on iPhone, iPad or Watch, because Apple has not resolved its argument with Brussels over the Digital Markets Act, and it is not available in China pending regulatory approval. It requires an iPhone 15 Pro or Pro Max, any iPhone 16 or 17, or the new 18 Pro; an iPad with an M1 or the A17 Pro; a Mac with Apple silicon; an Apple Watch Series 9, Ultra 2 or SE 3 or later; or a Vision Pro. And the user must be thirteen or older. If you have an iPhone 14 or a standard iPhone 15, you get iOS 27 and the old Siri.

What it does

The assistant now has what Apple calls personal context: it can read across your messages, mail, photos, calendar and files to answer a question such as when a friend's flight lands or what a contractor quoted, without your telling it where to look. It has on-screen awareness, so you can ask about whatever is in front of you. It can take actions inside apps rather than just opening them. It has web access for current information. There is a Siri mode in the camera app that acts on what the lens sees, a Write with Siri tool for drafting and rewriting text, and conversations sync across devices through iCloud. Apple's release describes it as "a more capable and conversational assistant", which is the description Apple gave the original Siri in 2011, and the caution of the beta label suggests the company knows how that comparison goes.

What everyone gets

The parts of iOS 27 that do not depend on a chip are the parts most people will notice. Liquid Glass, last year's translucent redesign that many users found hard to read, now has a slider in Settings from ultraclear to fully tinted, and the app icons have been sharpened; that is Apple conceding a point without saying so. Photos gains a Spatial Reframing tool, an Extend function that generates the edges of a picture, an upgraded Clean Up and SynthID watermark metadata for AI-generated images. Safari groups tabs by topic and can notify you when a web page changes. The Health app adds perimenopause and menopause tracking. AirPods get a custom equaliser. Apple quotes app launches thirty per cent faster, photo loading seventy per cent faster and AirDrop eighty per cent faster, which are the company's own measurements. For families, account setup now applies age-based safeguards, Ask to Browse lets a parent approve websites, Communication Safety detects violent as well as sexual content, and Screen Time has been redesigned around usage summaries and schedules.

Should you install it

Yes, on a phone that is not your only phone, and in a week, on one that is. Apple's first releases have become reliable, but the Siri beta touches every part of the system that holds personal data, and the sensible course with a beta that reads your mail is to let other people find its habits first. The iPhone 18 Pro ships on Friday with iOS 27 installed, and the Duo, announced last week, follows in October. If you are in Dubai and wondering whether the assistant will ever speak Arabic, Apple's release does not say, and nor, when we asked last year about Apple Intelligence, did Apple.