With Google’s Gemini, Apple relaunches Siri AI at Tim Cook’s final keynote

Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference opened in Cupertino on Monday with a long-delayed mea culpa dressed as a relaunch. Two years after it first promised a leap into artificial intelligence, the company finally showed a Siri overhauled into a conversational assistant it calls Siri AI, built in part with technology from arch-rival Google. The event was doubly freighted: it served as Tim Cook’s final keynote before he hands the chief executive’s role to hardware chief John Ternus in September, and it confronted the fallout from Apple’s abandoned 2024 Apple Intelligence rollout, which saw marketing campaigns pulled and a $250-million class-action lawsuit settled. [A1][A3][A32]

The new Siri AI, available as a standalone app, can sustain dialogue, parse what is on the screen, search the web, and act across apps—capabilities that were previewed in 2024 but never shipped. Integration with Google’s Gemini gives Siri the “broad world knowledge” Apple has long lacked, allowing it to answer follow-up questions and retrieve personal context from messages, emails, and photos. [A5][A25] The broader iOS 27 update brings a “Liquid Glass” transparency slider, a more responsive CPU scheduler that will even speed up 2019’s iPhone 11, and a suite of parental controls aimed at child safety. [A9][A35] The rollout, however, is hedged: the beta will be English-only, with the European Union and China excluded for now, a concession to regulatory friction that analysts on both sides of the Atlantic read as a warning that Apple’s AI ambitions will be shaped as much by Brussels and Beijing as by Cupertino. [A28][A13]

Viewed from Washington, the Google partnership raises eyebrows over competition; European commentators, notably in the German press, described the announcements as “predictable” and long-overdue, while French observers noted Apple is gambling that seamless integration of generative AI into every layer of the operating system will overcome its credibility gap. [A7][A13] Asian outlets emphasised the strategic import of Apple outsourcing to Gemini, framing it as a catch-up forced by the blistering advances of ChatGPT and local competitors. [A25][A36] In the Arab world and Latin America, coverage dwelt on the emotional farewell to Cook and the symbolic weight of the moment, with one Argentine report calling the event “agridulce”—bittersweet—given that the features closely echoed what was promised two years before. [A11][A33]

Apple’s bet is that by weaving Siri AI into iPhones, Macs, and its privacy-first architecture, it can turn a failure into a foundation. Yet the dependency on Google for core intelligence, and the staggered, region-restricted rollout, leave open whether this is truly the dawn of a new era or a sophisticated patch job. Ternus inherits a company whose AI story is only just being revised, and whose next chapters will be written as much in regulatory capitals as in its own design labs. [A28][A36]