Apple released the next generation of Apple Intelligence today, switching on a rebuilt Siri that answers open questions from web sources, reads what is on screen, and acts inside third-party apps. The assistant arrives in beta, in English, and with two of the world's largest consumer markets excluded.

In Short

Apple turned on a new version of Siri that can answer almost any question by pulling information from the web, look at what is on your screen, and do things inside apps like Outlook or WhatsApp. It runs on models Apple built with Google, and it is missing in the European Union and in China. If you make websites or buy ads, this is another place where people get answers without opening a page, and this one sits on the lock screen of a billion phones.

What Apple switched on

The company released the next generation of Apple Intelligence today alongside its 2027 software cycle, covering iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, watchOS 27 and visionOS 27. At the centre sits Siri AI, described by Apple as an entirely new version of the assistant with personal context understanding, broad world knowledge, onscreen awareness and systemwide app actions.

Rollout is staged. According to Apple, Siri AI begins in beta in English today, with French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish arriving next month. Apple Intelligence as a whole supports sixteen device languages: Chinese in simplified and traditional forms, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Vietnamese. The assistant is not available to users under 13.

Four capabilities define what the assistant does differently. Personal context understanding lets it retrieve across a user's messages, emails and photos. Broad world knowledge draws on information from across the web. Onscreen awareness allows questions and actions tied to whatever is displayed. Systemwide app actions extend the assistant into applications it does not own.

Apple's own example of personal context describes a user asking what a visiting relative suggested doing. Siri searches messages, surfaces a mention of baking a family recipe, retrieves the instructions from an older email, and adds ingredients to a list in Reminders. The onscreen example is a sports team's website, from which the assistant extracts upcoming home fixtures and writes them into a calendar.

Third-party reach is already live for some apps and promised for others. Texting through WhatsApp and playing a title in Audible work now. Drafting mail in Microsoft Outlook, searching an assignment in Notability and adding a restaurant to Tripsy are listed as coming.

New entry points across five operating systems

The invocation surface widened considerably. On iPhone, the assistant responds to the spoken trigger, the side button, or a downward swipe from the Dynamic Island. On iPad and Mac it sits inside Spotlight, converting the system search field into a question box. It also lives in systemwide context menus, so a Control-click on an image, file or block of text opens a query about that object. On Apple Vision Pro, the assistant appears as a 3D visualisation that can be placed in a room and activated by looking at it.

A dedicated Siri app now holds conversation history. According to Apple, the app uses iCloud to sync that history privately across a user's devices, so an exchange started on iPhone continues on Mac, iPad, Apple Watch or Vision Pro. That is a structural change worth noting: the assistant stops being a transient voice prompt and becomes a persistent, searchable thread with a home screen icon.

Dictation and voice also changed. Apple says systemwide dictation gains accuracy on devices running AFM Core Advanced, which it calls its most advanced on-device model. The footnotes narrow that list to iPhone Duo, iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max, iPhone Air, iPhone 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max, iPad from M4 with at least 12GB of unified memory, Mac from M3 with the same memory floor, and Apple Vision Pro with M5. Voice expressiveness and pace are user-adjustable.

An answer engine with no reporting layer

The detail with the longest reach for publishers is the least demonstrative one. Apple states that Siri AI can produce up-to-date information on virtually any topic, citing a football score, holiday planning tips and the best local coffee spot in an unfamiliar city as representative queries. Those are commercial queries. They are also the queries that historically produced a click.

Retrieval of that kind runs on crawled material, and Apple has been preparing the pipe for months. The company rewrote its Applebot documentation in June to formalise that crawled data may train the foundation models behind Apple Intelligence and Siri, setting out three independent controls covering crawling, training and real-time retrieval. The crawler pool then grew by 4,656 addresses in a single August update, taking the published total to 7,056, an expansion Apple has not explained.

What does not exist is the other half of the exchange. There is no impression count, no query report and no citation dashboard for content summarised inside a Siri answer. Microsoft built citation reporting into Bing Webmaster Tools and Clarity; Google extended AI performance reports to every site on 31 August 2026 while withholding click and query data. Apple has shipped neither.

The context around that gap is already measured. A randomised field experiment across 1,065 Chrome users found AI Overviews cut outbound organic clicks by 39.8% and raised zero-click searches by 34.5%. Chartbeat data covering more than 2,500 sites recorded small publishers losing roughly 60% of search referral traffic, with chatbot referrals still under 1% of all publisher page views. Assistant answers subtract reliably; they replace slowly. A new assistant on Apple's installed base adds to the subtraction side of that ledger from day one.

Daily limits, and a fee that has not been priced

Buried in the availability text is the first clear signal that Apple intends to charge for artificial intelligence. Certain features that depend on server-side models carry daily usage limits, including Siri AI itself, the intelligent photo editing tools, Image Playground and the AFM 3 Cloud models inside Shortcuts. Apple says those limits vary by feature, request complexity, system demand and system policies, and adds that expanded access will be available for a fee in the future.

No number is attached to the cap. No price is attached to the expansion. For an assistant positioned as a default system utility rather than an optional subscription, an unpriced ceiling is an unusual shape, and it places Apple alongside competitors that already gate their most capable agents behind paid tiers. Google restricted its Mac agent Spark to subscribers at $99.99 per month in July.

Photos, Safari, Mail and the rest of the surface

Beyond the assistant, the release touches applications that sit close to commercial behaviour.

Safari gained three tools. Tabs can be organised automatically into topics. Notify Me watches a page and alerts the user to changes, with product restocks and price drops named as the examples. Custom extensions can be generated from a written description. A browser that monitors price movements on a merchant's behalf, or against it, changes the mechanics of retail urgency messaging.

Photos taps larger image models. Spatial Reframing adjusts camera perspective after capture. Extend widens a shot. Clean Up removes distractions with what Apple describes as more realistic infill.

Image Playground runs a new generative model on Private Cloud Compute and now produces photorealistic output, generated from descriptions inside the Siri app as well as the standalone application. Mail and Messages gain Smart Reply drawn from a user's own writing style, with Mail suggestions able to trigger actions in third-party apps. Call Context surfaces confirmation codes and reservation numbers during calls to businesses. Calendar accepts plain descriptions for event creation. Shortcuts accepts the same for automation building. The Home app groups related notifications into single activities and generates descriptions for video clips, subject to a home hub and an eligible iCloud+ plan.

Systemwide proofreading now runs automatically as users type, including inside most third-party applications.

Apple adopts Google's watermark

One footnote carries disproportionate weight for advertising compliance. Apple says support for the SynthID standard is coming in a software update later this year, allowing images generated or edited with Apple Intelligence tools to be identified as synthetic. The footnote adds that inclusion covers most edited images, depending on which edits were applied.

SynthID is Google DeepMind's watermarking system. It is already the detection layer beneath Google's advertising disclosure regime, embedded automatically alongside C2PA markup in any image or video generated inside Google Ads tools, independent of the visible label setting the company rolled out across five advertising products in July. Google has named Apple among the third-party laboratories it works with on interoperable watermarking, a collaboration referenced when the company signed the EU code of practice ahead of the 2 August deadline that exposes providers to fines of up to 3% of turnover.

Photorealistic generation on consumer hardware, marked with the same signal that ad platforms read, moves a volume of synthetic imagery into the pipeline that brand safety classifiers may eventually be asked to sort. Coverage is partial by Apple's own admission, which is the recurring weakness of watermark-based detection: an unmarked file proves nothing.

Two markets left out

Siri AI is not available initially in the European Union on iOS, iPadOS and watchOS, and features that depend on it are absent there too. Apple states that it is working to find a path forward that preserves user privacy and security. Separately, neither Siri AI nor the other new Apple Intelligence features will appear in China while the company works through regulatory requirements.

Neither exclusion is new. Apple set out its position at WWDC26 in June, attributing the European gap to the Digital Markets Act and specifically to an interpretation under which any virtual assistant must be granted direct access to a user's private data and control over other installed applications. The company had already argued in September 2025 that compliance work delays feature availability in Europe. Last week's iPhone Duo presentation confirmed that European buyers pay the same price for a device that behaves differently.

For campaign planning inside Europe, the practical consequence is a persistent capability gap on hardware sold in the same catalogue. Audio Intelligence on Apple Watch carries the same carve-out.

Later this year: the wrist

Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 gain a set of features grouped as Audio Intelligence, arriving in beta in late 2026 in English, and not initially in the European Union. Sound Recognition alerts users who are deaf or hard of hearing to sirens, alarms, doorbells or a crying baby, using on-device processing and working without a nearby iPhone. Live Rewind returns the previous 15 seconds of conversation as text on a double press of the Digital Crown. Siri Recap produces titles and key points from conversations into the Siri app. Shazam identification becomes near-instant on the wrist.

The privacy architecture is specific. Apple says the S11 chip includes Secure Exclave, a hardware-isolated compartment that processes audio apart from the rest of the system and then deletes it, with no recordings created or stored and raw audio inaccessible to the operating system, apps, the user or Apple. Features are individually opt-in. Live Rewind plays an audible chime even on silent and shows a full-display animation so bystanders can tell it is running. Speakers are not identified or attributed by design. Siri Recap is described as a high-level summary rather than a transcript, excluding financial information and government-assigned identifiers.

A redesigned Health app with an Insights tab summarising sleep and peak VO2 max figures also arrives later this year.

The model underneath

Apple states that the new capabilities run on the next generation of Apple Foundation Models, custom-built in collaboration with Google and its Gemini models, operating on device and on servers using Private Cloud Compute. The arrangement was confirmed jointly in January and detailed at WWDC26, where the dependency drew immediate scrutiny over concentration, given Google's parallel ownership of Android and Chrome.

Siri AI uses a system orchestrator to reach core capabilities including the Spotlight index and App Toolbox, both of which Apple says run entirely on device. The company closes its release with the claim that Siri remains the world's most private digital assistant, a positioning statement rather than a measured finding.

Why this matters to marketers

Three threads run through the release for buyers and publishers.

The first is a new answer surface with no measurement layer, sitting on hardware where Apple also sells advertising. Apple Ads has expanded through 2026: additional App Store search positions from March, Maps advertising live since 21 August with a 15% back offer capped at 1,000 USD a month, and a unified Apple Ads Platform API that now covers both. An assistant that answers commercial questions on the same devices creates an inventory adjacency the company has not yet described.

The second is the compliance drift. Adopting SynthID pulls consumer-generated imagery into the same provenance framework that Google's advertising products already read, at a moment when labelling obligations are hardening in Europe.

The third is territorial fragmentation. A team running one creative strategy across Europe and North America now faces an assistant that exists on one side of the Atlantic and not the other, with no published timeline for repair.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Apple, affecting iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple Vision Pro users, app developers, publishers whose pages feed assistant answers, and marketing teams planning across regions. Google supplies the model family beneath Apple Foundation Models.

What: Release of the next generation of Apple Intelligence and Siri AI, a rebuilt assistant with personal context understanding, web-sourced answers, onscreen awareness, third-party app actions, a dedicated synced app, Visual Intelligence across four device classes, and Apple Intelligence features across Photos, Safari, Mail, Messages, Phone, Calendar, Shortcuts and Home. Server-side features carry daily usage limits with paid expansion signalled for the future.

When: Released today, September 14, 2026, in beta in English. French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish follow next month. Audio Intelligence, the redesigned Health app and SynthID support arrive later this year.

Where: Across iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, watchOS 27 and visionOS 27, on iPhone 16 or later plus iPhone 15 Pro models, iPad mini with A17 Pro, iPad and Mac from M1, MacBook Neo, Apple Vision Pro, Apple Watch Series 9 or later, Ultra 2 or later and SE 3. Siri AI is absent from the European Union on iOS, iPadOS and watchOS, and from China entirely.

Why: Apple positions the release as making everyday experiences more personal and helpful while keeping processing on device or inside Private Cloud Compute. For the advertising and publishing market, the release adds a large answer surface with no measurement layer, extends a Google-built model into Apple's ecosystem, and signals that access beyond daily limits will eventually be sold.