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The biggest reason to care about the iOS 27 beta is the new Siri, so I've spent the past couple of weeks running it against the old Siri on everyday tasks to see if it's the upgrade Apple is selling. My short answer is that yes, it's a clear step up, mostly because it finally follows what you're saying. It's not finished, though, and a couple of the headline tricks still fall flat.
Read More: iOS 27 public beta is here: Is the new Siri worth the bugs?
Siri finally follows what you're saying
I set a few alarms a couple of minutes apart to drag myself out of bed, so my first test was to ask Siri to turn on my 7:30 alarm. Then I asked what other alarms I had around that time, and it told me about my 7:33 and 7:36 ones. I said to turn those on as well, and it did, without me spelling out the times again. Old Siri would have lost the thread the moment I stopped naming exact times.
The new Siri does the same once you're inside an app or just asking a question. I opened Messages and asked it to find my latest transaction, and it pulled a payment from earlier in the day. That wasn't the most recent one, so I told it so, and it looked again and came back with the right one.
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When I asked about the FIFA World Cup results next, and instead of the old "here's what I found on the web" card, it just answered. When I followed up asking how many red cards were given during the game, it handled that without missing a beat. These web-backed questions are the slowest thing I've run into, but only slightly, nothing that made me raise an eyebrow.
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Where Siri still comes up short
The catch is that Siri is much better in the moment than it is at digging through your past. I asked it when a certain contact last called me, and it told me there was no record of that ever happening, even though I've gotten a handful of calls from them over the past few weeks and months. I also had it pull up my completed reminders about calling my accountant, and there were several of those, but it came back with nothing. So the deep personal memory Apple keeps talking about is there in theory. In practice, it couldn't reach into my call history or my older reminders yet. I expect that to get better, but it's shallow right now.
How Siri looks and works now
The way you interact with Siri has changed too, and I think it's for the better. Responses now appear in the Dynamic Island at the top of your screen instead of taking over the whole thing, so you can keep doing what you were doing. You can pull down on a response to open the full conversation, and there's a dedicated Siri app that keeps your history in one place. It makes the whole thing feel less like barking one-off commands and more like an actual chat.
Onscreen awareness is part of this too, and it mostly worked for me. A connection request came in on LinkedIn from someone whose profile was mostly in Mandarin, so I asked Siri to translate it. It didn't handle it inline. It gave me a button to open the Translate app first, and once I did, the translated text from the page was sitting right there. It's not as smooth as Circle to Search, the Android feature that lets you select anything on your screen and look it up instantly, but for a first attempt it's not bad at all.
The trust and privacy questions
Now that Siri leans on a large language model (the kind of AI behind chatbots like ChatGPT) for its harder answers, the obvious worry is that it starts making things up with full confidence. So far, I haven't caught it doing that even once. When it doesn't know something or can't find it, it tells me instead of inventing an answer. That, plus how it took my correction on the transaction, adds up to an assistant I trust more than I expected to.
The trade is that all this helpfulness comes from Siri reaching deeper into your stuff, your Messages, Mail, Photos, and more. On top of that, the hardest questions can get routed out to Google's Gemini, which reportedly does a lot of Siri's heavy lifting behind the scenes. Apple says it handles the sensitive work through its own cloud service, built so your data isn't stored or seen on the other end. I take some comfort in that, though I'd feel better once I can pick the model I trust for myself.
The Claude option I'm still waiting on
This is the one thing I keep coming back to. Apple said you'll be able to swap the model behind Siri, picking ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Grok instead of the default. In this beta, only the ChatGPT extension shows up in Settings. I use Claude for most of my day, so I want to see how routing Siri's tougher questions through it would change the answers I get. That's not something I can try yet. If you want the background on why a third-party model matters here, we got into why Apple's Gemini-powered Siri could finally be useful.
So is it better? Clearly, yes, especially once you've had a proper back-and-forth with it. It's a touch slower to respond than the old Siri, but not enough to bug me. You'll want to keep your expectations in check on the memory side, and you'll need an iPhone 15 Pro or newer to try any of it. I think Apple is most of the way there, and closer than I expected them to be.
