• by Laurie Sullivan , Yesterday

Apple has struggled to implement an advanced set of artificial intelligence (AI) features, but on Monday at WWDC 2026 it announced a new set of AI features and smarter personalized intelligence based on a collaboration with Google.

Earlier this year, Apple struck a deal with Google to integrate Gemini to power new Apple Intelligence and Siri features, which allowed Apple to focus on products rather than the underlying AI technology.

Siri AI relies heavily on structured on-device data and app protocols rather than scraping web pages, so brands need to optimize product details by shifting digital strategies from standard web search engine optimization (SEO) to ecosystem integration, according to Apple’s developer page.

Mike Rockwell, Apple vice president of Siri Engineering, explained the new version of Siri AI in a streaming online presentation, demonstrating the model to build travel experiences and highlight a more customizable voice feature that expanding beyond a selection of pre-set voices to more options including pace and expressivity.

Siri AI now appears under the “Siri mode” on the iPhone camera to understand images, even to the point of taking a photo of items laid out on a bed to determine whether all will fit in a suitcase for a trip. The voice feature will name the brands as it goes through the list of items the user intends to place into a suitcase.

The “Siri mode” also allows users to take a photo of a plate of food to get an estimate of the nutritional information.

The new architecture, based on Apple Foundation Models, was co-developed with Google, which Apple says it is adapted to run both on-device and on servers through its existing Private Cloud Compute infrastructure.

This architecture powers multimodal features and more personalized Siri that is capable of complex reasoning and cross-app task completion.

Advertisers integrating brand apps with the Apple Intelligence ecosystem allow Siri AI to perform multi-step actions. In response to requests from users, it can pull flight tickets, clothing options and hotel listings, as well as pay for them via Apple Pay.

Privacy Apple leverages specialized methods like differential privacy to scramble data, stripping away personal identities.

Apple also announced a dedicated Siri app, so it remembers more and users can “pick up old conversations or start fresh ones,” because they are synced across the user’s devices through iCloud.