I spent 48 hours comparing Siri AI to Gemini — and Apple really impressed me

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It’s safe to say Apple has taken its sweet time bringing its AI ambitions to fruition. After debuting Apple Intelligence two years ago, Apple unveiled a whole new Siri at WWDC 2026 last week. Dubbed Siri AI, the completely rebuilt virtual assistant is a complete overhaul of the much-maligned, on-device voice assistant with Apple Intelligence underpinnings.

Obviously, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it, so I rushed to install the iOS 27 developer beta and signed up for the Siri AI waitlist. Since then, I’ve spent the last 48 hours or so testing out the newfangled AI assistant and comparing it with Google Gemini.

The results have been interesting. Suffice it to say that Siri has come a long way.

Before we get into the deep dive, it’s important to note some context. Apple has made some bold promises to alter how we interact with our smartphones by turning the often-criticized voice prompt into a deeply integrated system orchestrator. In simple terms, Siri now indexes a significant amount of local information — including your text messages, emails, calendar entries, and more — locally. For simpler requests, all data handling happens on your device without sending it to the cloud.

For tasks that cannot be handled on-device, a subset of this locally processed information without widespread identifiers is then sent up to a cloud model for processing when needed. This cloud LLM runs on Google Gemini’s technology stack, but contrary to popular opinion is not the same as Gemini.

Compared to the Gemini models on our phones today, this hybrid local and cloud approach is somewhat different and likely to be more secure and less computationally intensive for Apple. It also allows deep hooks into your personal data.

Likewise, it’s also worth noting that because I am testing this software in its absolute infancy as a developer preview, performance can be unpredictable, and the feature set is likely to change or evolve by the time the final public release hits iPhones.