Two years after a stumbling first attempt at artificial intelligence, Apple is heading back to the Worldwide Developers Conference stage on Monday with a rebuilt Siri, a new way to search the iPhone, and an operating system update that sounds less like a redesign and more like a deep clean. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports that iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, watchOS 27, tvOS 27 and visionOS 27 will roll out this fall alongside new iPhones and Apple Watches. The keynote kicks off at 10 a.m. Pacific (10:30 p.m. IST) from Cupertino, and the company is leaning heavily on AI features it was supposed to ship in 2024. The headline twist: the new Siri is powered by a Google Gemini model under a billion-dollar deal, with much of it hosted on Google servers.
The Siri Rebuild Is the Centrepiece, and the Privacy Asterisk
Internally called Campo, the new Siri is meant to act less like a voice remote and more like an actual assistant. Per Gurman, it can pull data from across your iPhone—notes, calendar, contacts, past emails—and stitch it into a draft email or a scheduling reply. Ask if you are free Thursday before booking something, and Siri will check. You can also chain multiple commands into one prompt: weather, calendar event, message, all in a single ask. For a company that has spent years marketing on-device privacy, the Google-hosted backbone is the awkward bit—and something Apple will likely have to address on stage. Bloomberg also notes that Apple is labelling the assistant a "beta" internally, hinting at a slow rollout, possibly behind a waitlist.
A New Search or Ask Panel Changes How You Use the iPhone
Swipe down from the top centre of the iPhone and you will no longer get notifications—you will get Search or Ask, a typing-first AI interface that can launch apps, run shortcuts, search the web, or hand the query off to a chatbot. Notifications move to a top-left swipe. Per Bloomberg, users will be able to toggle between ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini inside this panel—a first for Apple, which has so far only integrated ChatGPT. A standalone Siri app is also coming to iPhone, iPad and Mac, with a chat-thread layout, iCloud sync, photo attachments and auto-deleting conversations. Apple is building its own web search engine inside Siri too, putting it on a collision course with Perplexity—a startup Gurman says Apple once considered acquiring.
iOS 27 Is Apple's Snow Leopard Moment, with India Quietly in the Frame
Beyond Siri, the release is being pitched as a stability pass. Gurman compares it to Mac OS X Snow Leopard and iOS 12—better battery life, fewer Liquid Glass readability quirks in macOS, faster Macs on Apple silicon. The Camera app gains a customisable widget bar and a Siri shortcut for Visual Intelligence, which now reads nutrition labels and contact cards. Photos picks up Extend, Reframe and Enhance tools. Wallet gets bill-splitting and a Create a Pass option. iOS 27 also quietly lays groundwork for a foldable iPhone later this year, and Bloomberg notes Apple is building more features for users in India, Indonesia and Malaysia—markets it has been actively trying to grow in.
