Apple's new Gemini-powered Siri is finally coming in February — everything you need to know

The smarter Siri 2.0 we've been waiting to try on our iPhones for almost two years may finally appear next month, says Mark Gurman's latest Power On newsletter at Bloomberg. But even greater changes could be in store for Apple's summer developer conference.

Gurman was writing about the Apple and Google AI deal months ahead of the official announcement. So when he says "[Apple] has been planning an announcement of the new Siri in the second half of February, when it will give demonstrations of the functionality," we have little reason to doubt him.

Specifically, Gurman says the new Siri will come in iOS 26.4, which should arrive as a beta in February and then launch formally by early April at the latest.

It will be this version of the iPhone's software that will finally give us the AI features first promised at WWDC in 2024 when Apple Intelligence was introduced to the world.

This includes powers like Personal Context to keep track of your previous conversations, on-screen awareness and the ability to take action in apps on your behalf. All of these were demoed two summers ago, but have yet to make it to any beta version of iOS, let alone a stable version.

Siri 3.0 could come a lot quicker than Siri 2.0

Gurman's account is a fun narrative of corporate negotiations and why Google (initially set aside as a potential partner) ended up being Apple's ultimate choice instead of the more 'obvious' choices of OpenAI or Anthropic. But it also tells us about what to expect from the next step forward to Siri, which should be coming this summer.

We can apparently expect another overhaul to Apple's digital assistant to come with iOS 27, macOS 27 and the rest of Apple's next generation of operating systems.

In addition to being smarter than ever, this Siri will allegedly take cues from ChatGPT and Gemini to offer chatbot-style interaction and abilities, like answering questions in a conversational fashion or proactively suggesting actions to take in linked apps, according to one rumor.

These new capabilities will come as a result of Apple moving the underlying processes to Google's infrastructure, to help with the speed and precision of responses.

This makes sense, but the big question would be what impact this shift would have on Apple's Private Cloud Compute, its guarantee that your AI-powered prompts and results aren't visible to the company.

We don't know if Apple will make a big deal out of the iOS 16.4 update with a formal launch, or if the new Siri will debut with barely a whisper. But it seems we don't have long to find out if these rumors are true, and if the new features are worth the wait.

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