Apple ships iOS 27 and a completely new Siri AI

Apple has released iOS 27, iPadOS 27, watchOS 27 and visionOS 27 at the same time, with Siri AI the headline feature across all four platforms.

A new Siri, arriving in beta

Siri AI is the long-delayed overhaul of the assistant, and it ships today as a beta for English-language devices. Apple says French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish support follows in October. The new version is built on the next generation of Apple Intelligence and draws on personal context from messages, emails and photos, alongside onscreen awareness and a wider set of system-wide app actions.

On iPhone the update adds a Liquid Glass opacity slider that shifts the interface between a clearer and a frostier look, redesigned icons across many built-in apps, extra-large widgets, and separate volume settings for ringtones, alarms, timers, alerts and system sounds.

What else changes

watchOS 27 brings new Workout Buddy features, an extra tap gesture, Liquid Glass refinements, more Smart Stack suggestions and an improved Find My app. On iPad, Apple has sped up file transfer to external drives and browsing, and improved the handover between Wi-Fi and mobile data. visionOS 27 gives Vision Pro users Siri AI, notification previews triggered by looking at them, Control Centre changes, and the ability to turn their own panoramas into immersive scenes.

iOS 27 runs on iPhone 11, iPhone SE (second generation) and later. watchOS 27 needs an Apple Watch SE 3, Apple Watch Series 9 or later, or an Apple Watch Ultra 2 or later. iPadOS 27 covers iPad Pro from the fourth generation and M1 models onwards, iPad Air from the fourth generation and M2 onwards, the sixth-generation iPad mini, and the ninth-generation iPad and later.

Our opinion

Shipping Siri AI as a beta is the honest call. The overhaul has already slipped once, and a staged rollout in a single language looks far better than another blown date. The danger is that the beta label invites everyone to judge a half-finished assistant, while rivals have spent two years shipping tools that do less but do them now. The real test is not the demo but whether Siri AI holds up when personal context meets awkward, messy data. If it does, iOS 27 is the release that finally makes Apple Intelligence feel like an assistant rather than a settings toggle.