[UPDATE] Apple's Siri Rebuild Comes Into Focus Before WWDC

The picture of what Apple plans to ship at WWDC on June 8 is sharpening. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, who has been by far the most accurate reporter on Apple's AI plans, published a detailed feature on May 28 covering the Siri overhaul, a standalone chatbot-style app, and a third-party extensions system that lets users plug in models from other vendors. We covered the unannounced genai.apple.com domain last week; this fills in much of what that page will probably host.

Three substantive changes worth flagging.

Siri is being rebuilt around Google's Gemini

This one is awkward. After years of Apple insisting its own foundation models would power the next Siri, Gurman reports that Apple has licensed Google's Gemini to do the heavy lifting, at least at launch. Apple's internal models reportedly underperformed in testing, and the company decided to ship something working rather than wait. Cupertino partnering with Mountain View for AI brains is the kind of admission that would have been unthinkable for an Apple keynote five years ago.

A standalone Siri app, with memory

The new Siri is being designed as a full chatbot, with persistent chat history, continuous dialogue and contextual memory across sessions. MacRumors reports the UI uses a dark colour scheme with no light mode at launch, matching the marketing art Apple has been previewing for WWDC. The functional gap with ChatGPT and Claude is what Apple is trying to close: less "set a timer," more "help me think through this."

Extensions: users can swap models

Possibly the most consequential change is the new Extensions system. Per Bloomberg, iOS 27 will let users designate a third-party AI service as the default engine for system-wide functions including Writing Tools, Image Playground and Siri itself. Gemini and Claude are reportedly already being tested internally as Extensions. If this ships as described, Apple becomes one of the few platform owners willing to cede the assistant slot. Google's Android equivalent still defaults to Gemini with no real alternative.

WWDC opens June 8. Until then, all of this is well-sourced reporting rather than confirmation. The genai.apple.com page will presumably go live during the keynote.