Apple has finally delivered on one of its most anticipated promises. The completely reimagined AI-powered version of Siri launched this month alongside iOS 26.4, marking the most fundamental transformation of Apple’s voice assistant since its original introduction in 2011. The new Siri is not just a smarter version of the old one. It is essentially a different product, built around new capabilities that reflect how dramatically AI technology has advanced in the past three years.
What Is Actually New
The new Siri operates with what Apple calls on-screen awareness, meaning it can see and understand whatever is currently displayed on your iPhone screen and respond intelligently to it. If you are reading a message, Siri can help you reply in context. If you are looking at a photo, it can answer questions about what it sees. If you are browsing a website, it can summarise or interact with the content. This represents a genuine leap beyond the command-response model that defined the old Siri.
Seamless cross-app integration is the other headline feature. The new Siri can move information and actions between apps on your behalf without you needing to switch manually. Ask it to take the address from a message and add it to your calendar, or to find a photo from last month and share it in your current conversation, and it will execute those multi-step tasks without needing step-by-step instructions.
The Google Gemini Partnership
In a move that surprised many observers, Apple has partnered with Google to use its 1.2 trillion parameter Gemini AI model to power Siri’s advanced capabilities. The processing runs on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute infrastructure to maintain the company’s strict privacy standards, meaning your data is not being sent to Google’s servers for general training purposes. It is an unusual arrangement that reflects the pragmatic reality of AI development — building frontier AI models is extraordinarily expensive and even Apple has decided that partnering makes more sense than building from scratch.
What UAE Users Should Know
UAE iPhone users will receive the iOS 26.4 update through the standard software update process. The new Siri features are available in English now with Arabic language support expected to follow in a subsequent update. Users should update via Settings → General → Software Update to access the new capabilities.
Source: Apple, Crescendo AI, TechCrunch
