Siri's big Apple Intelligence upgrades sound a whole lot like Gemini

Apple held its annual WWDC keynote today. A lot of the presentation was dedicated to AI: There were some novel applications of the tech, like a new Reframe feature that lets you simulate repositioning your iPhone camera after taking a photo, creating an image that looks like the same moment shot from a different perspective. Then there’s Siri AI, which sounds more or less like Gemini built for iOS.

The new version of Siri can do a lot of the same things Google likes to talk about Gemini doing. It can answer questions conversationally across Apple’s different platforms, react to content on your screen, and access information both from the internet and across your personal Apple account. There’s also a new, dedicated Siri app where your interactions are saved so you can revisit them later.

Apple’s added new writing tools to Siri that let it generate text from a prompt in just about any field. Siri will be able to access information in your Apple-linked email, texts, photos, so it should be able to answer questions and generate text grounded in your own personal context.

This new AI-powered version of Siri does seem more customizable than Gemini, at least, allowing users to personalize the synthesized voice the assistant responds with using sliders that change both the pace and level of expressiveness of speech output.

Siri AI will be out in beta later this year. Older iPhones won’t be able to take advantage, however: the newest version of Siri will be compatible with iPhone 16 or newer, as well as iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max.