I tried Siri AI, and so far it actually works

Parents want one thing, and one thing only, out of AI: to add a list of soccer games or “spirit week” theme days from an email or a poorly formatted flyer onto their calendar in one shot. And I have good news for parents with iPhones — the new Siri can finally do this.

After stumbling through its first launch of an AI-imbued Siri, Apple is trying again. The newly upgraded Siri AI can chat with you about what might be killing the roses in your yard, put together a shopping list for the hardware store, and set a reminder to lay down some compost in that flower bed. It can reference information in your email and calendar to make its recommendations or provide an actually helpful answer to the question: “When should I leave for the airport?” And yes, it can even add a list of events from an email to your calendar. I tried all of these scenarios out for myself and I saw it happen. AI Siri is for real this time.

But it’s also a pretty basic set of features for an AI assistant in 2026, particularly if you compare it to what Gemini has been doing on Android for the past couple of years. Google’s chatbot has been able to add multiple calendar events from a screenshot for at least a year at this point. It’s been diagnosing plant problems and scheduling maintenance reminders for months now, if not longer. New Siri is built on Gemini models, so it makes a lot of sense that the first iteration of Siri AI feels a little bit “Gemini, circa 2025.”

Siri AI has its own flavor, though. Apple has a lot of proprietary stuff going on under the hood and in the cloud. It draws from an on-device pool of data that’s gleaned from things like email and messages. This information is indexed so Siri can tap into the relevant bits when needed. Prompts that can’t be handled fully on device are sent to Apple’s Private Cloud Compute with only the relevant pieces of personal data attached. Gemini handles personal context differently; you opt into sharing your Gmail or calendar, and then it’ll go directly to those sources to get the information when needed.

Siri AI working well depends a lot on the AI understanding context. So far, it’s doing pretty well. I asked it when I needed to return some camera gear I rented for WWDC, and it found the information from a calendar event I’d made and in an email (it’s due back Friday, for the record). Likewise, prompting it with something like “add these events to my calendar” will consistently trigger it to reference the information on my screen. So far, so good.

I couldn’t get Siri to engage in any shenanigans — I didn’t exactly stress test it, but the guardrails were strong enough to return a curt “I can’t help you with that” to a shady prompt. Fair. As a conversationalist, new Siri also seems a bit more dispassionate than Gemini. I gave them both the same prompt asking why the flowers in front of my house seemed to be wilting. They both gave wordy responses with a lot of possible causes, but Gemini’s started with “That is incredibly frustrating…” where Siri was more direct and got right into diagnosing the situation.

The new Siri handled my follow-up requests well, too. I asked it to recommend a garden center “near home” and it came up with a good suggestion. It also created a new reminder list with some checklist items for my garden rehab project and added a calendar event, all from a single prompt. Pretty basic stuff, but this is Siri. The fact that it works at all is a step forward that’s been years in the making.

New Siri pops up in a lot of places on the iPhone. I’ve gotten into the habit of swiping down on the homescreen and using search to get to apps, and every time I do there’s a big prompt to “search or ask” with a glowing, blinking cursor. Long pressing the wake button summons Siri from the Dynamic Island now, too, rather than presenting it as a glowing border around the screen. The changes all add up to a subtle feeling that you’re never very far away from Siri.

This iteration of Siri feels like the AI assistant you’d build if you knew you couldn’t screw it up. It supports a pretty basic set of features — it’s not out here DoorDashing your burritos for you — but it actually does what’s advertised. For the company that made big promises of Siri two years ago that never materialized, that’s a big deal. “It works” and “It will actually ship to customers” are the two targets that Apple couldn’t miss here. It’s only in a developer beta now, but it’s realer than the first AI Siri we were shown at WWDC ever was. Apple needs this version of Siri to earn back trust. And based on what I’ve seen so far, this looks like a small step toward getting that trust back.

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge